Witness Consensus: @therealwolf
Yesterday, @cervantes published a post where he summarized the witness consensus at the time regarding a few changes towards Steem.
I applaud this move, even though it was a bit premature as most witnesses weren't aware of the publishing of the spreadsheet and were left in the open, without being able to explain the given decisions. Especially since most decisions require a bit more than just "YES", "NO" or "OK".
In this post, I'm going over and explain my given decisions towards different core changes.
Decisions on Changes
| Change | Explanation | Decision |
|---|---|---|
| n^1 rewards curve | The rewards curve shall be kept linear as introduced in HF19 (keeping it as it is today) | Approve |
| n^1.3 rewards curve | The rewards curve shall be updated from linear to a “mid-superlinear” n^1.3 | Interesting (Testing Required) |
| 50% curation rewards | The reward distribution per post should be updated from 75% for authors and 25% for curators to 50% and 50% respectively | Approve |
| 5 minutes curation window | The curation window shall be reduced from 15 minutes to 5 | Approve |
| 3 minutes curation window | The curation window shall be reduced from 15 minutes to 3 | Approve (Prefer 1m) |
| 10% free downvotes | Users shall be able to downvote 1 post/day at -100% without actually decreasing the amount of remaining voting power | Disapprove |
| Separated upvote/downvote pools | Users shall be able to downvote 10 posts/day at -100% without actually decreasing the amount of remaining voting power but consuming its separated “downvoting power” from its own pool | Approve (10x -100% seems too high) |
For some changes, the initial idea is great that's why I'd approve/accept it, however, they do require more discussions and fine-tuning.
Explanation
Rewards Curve: n^1 vs n^1.3
We're currently using the n^1 rewards curve and it works. I'm not in favour of changing it without reason, but rather being open about other curves as well. Steem initially had a n^2 curve and I would be very much interested how Steem would work with a n^1.3 curve. But only in combination with the curation changes & downvote pool as well and only on a testnet which resembles the main-net as best as possible.
Curation Rewards: 50%
Right now, authors receive 75% while curators receive ~25%, from which also a bit goes back to the reward pool if a vote is cast prior to the post being at least 15 minutes old. I believe this is a problem, as it gives the incentive for behaviour like self-voting & vote-selling, instead of focusing on curation/finding undervalued content.
I believe that higher curation rewards in combination with a more incentivized downvote-action, accounts would be hesitant about what they vote, due to the possibility of their rewards being reset. And on the other side, the incentive to find undervalued and higher quality content is being put into a positive feedback loop.
Now, some services as @utopian-io are rewarding their contributors with author rewards via votes, which would be reduced. However, they could simply pay out a certain % of the curation rewards for the given vote if needed.
Curation Window: 15m vs 5m vs 3m vs. 1m (?)
When I first read the proposal I wasn't completely sure why it was being proposed, however, after reading smooths comment it made a lot of sense:
Quote @smooth: I'm in favour of the shortest proposed window (3m in this case) as I actually think the window should be even shorter, like 30s-1m. I don't think it should be used to force humans and bots into head-to-head competition. Instead, I see the value of the window as a short opportunity for bots to bid down the curation rewards on easy sure thing type content (known authors etc) for which curation is low value. These rewards forfeited by bots via this auction rewards are returned to the pool and can be paid out some elsewhere they have more value. Once the short window is over, humans should not ever need to 'time' their votes.
I don't have much more to add to that and am in favour of a 3m or even 1m curation window, as it's pretty much just time wasted for humans, waiting for a post to vote on.
Downvotes: 10% free vs. seperate pool
Steem is a system which relies on upvotes and downvotes working together to find good content. And I feel that Steem has been trying to emulate other social media platforms over the last year, but it didn't work out.
Giving out rewards to users from a public reward pool requires that people are able to guard this reward pool. And right now: downvotes have a big negative cost attached to it. You can either upvote a post and earn curation rewards, or do something good for the public and downvote an abusive post.
The latter will result in no revenue for the user and thus no incentive to do that. Now, my biggest argument against any incentivised downvotes was always the fact that this could create toxicity, more flag wars and maybe spire out of control.
However, what I realized over the last few days is the fact that Steem is different. And the way it's working right now is not good enough.
That's why I'm in favour of a separate downvote pool, with a downvote power of at maximum 3x -100% downvotes (Roughly 20-30% of the voting mana) with the reason to start small and to see & analyse what the consequences/results are.
Let's make Steem greater!
I also want to mention that my decisions are not set in stone and that I'm very much open to discuss and argue about my position/the different changes.
But please keep in mind that, in my opinion, we will not have a flourishing Steem if we never try anything new, keep our head down and avoid the risky changes.
And for that, let me quote Steve Jobs:
Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes... the ones who see things differently -- they're not fond of rules... You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things... they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.
Steem is very much a square in a world of round holes, wouldn't you agree? Where else do you get paid for blogging, contributing and even gaming?
And I believe now is the right time that we show the world even more how different Steem actually is. We still have a few months left until SMTs come around. We can use this time and do nothing, or we can try to improve Steem - for all of us.
Sincerely,
@therealwolf
If you believe that I'm of value for Steem, then please vote for me as witness. You can also set me as a proxy and I'll vote on great witnesses for you. You can learn more about me and my witness infrastructure on therealwolf.me.
Thanks for considering the proposal items in detail @therealwolf. As for downvoting and speaking my POV, I think just having one or two downvotes per day on a separate pool (and with the upvote pool being able to be used for downvotes as well as usual) would be good enough for me to freely voice a negative opinion (downvote) in the most important section: Steem’s trending / highest payout posts. I think anymore more on the separate pool is overkill..
I feel the same way, at least for now. I mean, we can have these settings as witness parameters so they could be easily tweaked. But I'd rather start small and slow, instead of going overkill.
And btw - thanks for voicing your opinion. Interested in chatting with you at SF!
That'll be best. I wish I still have my dev hands especially during these times!
Oh you're going? Great! Sure, plenty of time during those 5 days :)
Where I can talk seriously with you, there are important things I want to talk about.
Your My witness Now
I really like the idea of a separate mana bar for downvoting, even if it's only 30% the size of the upvote one.
Most of the time when I see spammy comments I tend to prefer to upvote other decent comments to make the bad comment go to the bottom instead of flagging it.
Posted using Partiko Android
Exactly - many users would take advantage of this to clean Steem from abuse. We just have to make sure it in itself isn't being turned into an abuse mechanism.
I am kind of indifferent about the other proposed changes but I can not accept the idea of 50/50 author and curation rewards.
It may incentivize curators and may be will increase votes in worthy authors but I don't think it will affect self-voting.
If I self-vote after 15 minutes I can still have nearly 100% of my rewards. Producing good quality content is expensive, an author may get more votes but will he/she get 50% more votes (votes here is not quantity but rewards)? I am not sure. So, reduction in quality content.
It may incentivize investment powering up, but that also incentivize use SP to vote for curation i.e. curation bots. We may see some bid bots go away but we may also see this new types of bots.
If you'd self-vote on your posts and they will result in a high payout then it's useful. But you could vote on other posts with the chance of even higher payouts.
And with 1-3 free downvotes per day, the risk is higher for people downvoting your posts if you post bad stuff.
The curation reward ratio doesn't give an incentive to self vote. Self voting is inherently desirable and incentivized regardless of the ratio, regardless of the reward curve. Curation will always be less incentivized than self voting unless votes are countered in some way or curation is 100% (0% author rewards), because you can't go higher than financially extracting 100% of your voting influence.
The reward curve at superlinear only changes who has the ability to farm their votes, it transfers that power from small voters to large voters. People like to pretend that self voting and vote selling wasn't happening before the reward curve change, it was actually worse than today but happening among a smaller group who didn't have to open it up to the market. Randowhale was also launched before linear reward curve.
There is only one thing that will make vote farming go away, and that's accountability. Increasing downvotes will make it easier, but ultimately the largest stakeholders need to have the mindset to engage in applying accountability to selfish voters. I know around here we like to think if we just tweak the incentives everything will change, but contrary to popular belief humans are not completely driven by incentives (see extrinsic vs intrinsic motivation), and tweaking incentives only goes so far. You can have two groups of people with the exact same system of incentives, yet resulting in different outcomes based on the attitudes of the people involved (see Bob Altemeyers psychological experiments where people play a political game. The game rules never change, but based on the selection of personality types for participants, you get radically different outcomes).
We don't have the option of changing the personality types involved, or even having any influence on it whatsoever. People come and go as they please.
We do have the option of changing the economic incentives and in fact you can run the same experiment as above in reverse: Keep the personality types (or individuals) the same and change the economic incentives. You will get most certainly different outcomes. (Of course this broad class of experiment has been run a huge number of times in both controlled psych research settings as well as many other systems.)
I don't think anyone ever claimed this. That is not the same thing as saying that incentives don't influence behavior. They certainly do.
The individuals who have the largest stakes can change their policy on how they use that stake. That's not an option for me (I can only choose how I apply mine) but it is an option for them.
When people argue that we don't have a problem with culture, that is essentially what they are saying, that only incentives are a way for behaviour of participants in the system to change.
I'm going to say it again. We don't have a knob we can turn to change the culture. By contrast, we can adjust the code. Perhaps that influences culture but such uncertain influence is the best we can do. Culture is a dependent variable not an independent one.
If my vote is worth 5$ via self-voting, but I can get out 8$ with curation by voting on the right content, then curation has a bigger incentive. And people usually follow what is worth more.
What is selfish? Using the own stake to get the most out of it? I mean, most humans on earth live to work, what is so wrong with trying to get out of this loop by making money with Steem?
What I want is for people to be rewarded for holding Steempower, while doing the right thing. This means: voting for good content, contribution instead of an endless loop of shitposts.
You can't reliably get $8 from curation. The reliable amount you'd get is going to be about 50% of the value of your vote, less than a self vote.
Selfish in this context is people who are aiming to maximize the amount of stake they get from the system as opposed to acting in a way to build the network and make it more valuable as a whole. Essentially farming your votes.
Sure you can. You just gotta vote on the right posts.
https://steemworld.org/@aicurator
So you're saying that when somebody has let's say 50 Steempower that person should rather work on increasing the value of Steem instead of trying to get more Steem?
That person would have the same ROI when STEEM goes from 1$ to 10$ as if he'd go from 50 Steempower to 500 Steempower. Only that the latter is much easier to accomplish aka. it's actually something the person can influence.
Then not everyone can do it. The best curators have to take curation rewards from other voters to achieve high returns. There's half as much money in total available for curation vs. for self voting, so it can only be used to motivate a very few. It's completely untenable that curation be overall more rewarding in general than self voting unless there is also major vote policing going on as well. In other words the only way to make self voting less attractive than curation is to bring down the returns on self voting, not increase curation.
Yes, I think if we were doing that collectively it would be extremely powerful and have much better returns than vote farming. We'd be turning Steem from a niche tech thing that a few people can milk for some extra money*, into something valuable for the world.
The way you calculate ROI here is a bit confused. Going from 50 SP to 500SP is not a return on investment. You don't put in 50 SP as an investment and get out 500SP, even 100% self voting unless you're talking many years. This actually kind of proves my point, the only way you get 10* and better returns is by the value of the coin going up.
You're right that it's hard for a small stakeholder to influence the price positively, though it could be easier to influence it negatively. By vote farming you make vote farming seem acceptable to those around you. It's easy to lower the standard of social acceptability and undermine norms, everyone has some power to influence that. Ultimately it's the larger stakeholders with the power to create and enforce norms in our system, so I don't expect it to happen from the bottom up.
* Note: the people who have been milking Steem in the last 10 months have most likely lost money if they bought early in the year. Even self voters are likely largely down.
yes I think the 50% curation is a must
added downvote incentives is crucial too, but having them as high as upvotes is far too excessive, esp going from where we are atm where downvotes are prohibitively expensive
Congratulations! Your post has been selected as a daily Steemit truffle! It is listed on rank 24 of all contributions awarded today. You can find the TOP DAILY TRUFFLE PICKS HERE.
I upvoted your contribution because to my mind your post is at least 28 SBD worth and should receive 426 votes. It's now up to the lovely Steemit community to make this come true.
I am
TrufflePig, an Artificial Intelligence Bot that helps minnows and content curators using Machine Learning. If you are curious how I select content, you can find an explanation here!Have a nice day and sincerely yours,
TrufflePigthese are interesting figures and might do welll for a new curation group named @nedshare, led by @whatsup. she will love to go over all this as well as our group. thank you for the heads up on the communication and spreadsheet. we will all discuss and come back with any questions. maybe you can come on my show on RED Radio to discuss further?
Eagle Spirit
ps. read over this after you dropped it in msp
I like the idea of a separate Mana for downvoting... however...
I think downvoting needs to have some cost associated to it. both to the person receiving the downvote and the person using it.
I don't have a fully formed idea how to implement this, but, I applaud you for thinking about it.
Here's to the Crazy Ones!..the square pegs in the round holes.
bravo