How to make Steem great again: the Exponential Author Reward Method
Since a few weeks an idea, how to improve the Steem ecosystem exists in my head and I couldn't figure out how to properly transfer the idea to the community.
Recently I started my first "App" on the Steem Blockchain - the SteemHQ.com Community Witness - and I feel like now is the right time to present you a proposal how to radical improve the Steem Blockchain for mass adaption and how to achieve a much fairer and less exploitable distribution of the Steem author reward pool.
Components
The following proposal requires a rework of the Steem author reward system on protocol level which could be rolled out in an upcomming hardfork. For such a drastical change consensus of all witnesses and Steem stakeholders is required.
Proposal
The proposal is called "Exponential Author Reward Method" and will try achieve a much fairer and less exploitable distribution of the Steem author reward pool.
- The higher the author reward for a content post, the lower the reward for another upvote of equal voting power
- The higher the author reward for a content post, the higher the penality for another downvote of equal voting power
Mockups / Examples
Benefits
Wider distribution of the reward pool
Speaking of today, a large part of the reward pool goes into the hands of a small number of accounts. The proposal would lead to a wider distribution of the reward pool and further encourage voting for quality content and downvoting for bad content.
Steem will only be successful if the project can grow much further, so the value for content should be measured on quality instead a backup of large stakeholders or a large stake of Steempower.
Lower the impact of voting bots
Voting bots are here to stay on the Steem blockchain. With this change, the positive effect in promoting quality content with bots will stay but it'll become less profitable the higher the reward is pushed and more of a risk of getting a downvote, which will have a much higher impact. Money put into voting bots will be much more at stake, when somebody tries to promote bad content.
Encourage downvoting on bad content
With downvoting becoming more powerful on higher valued content, community-driven services like @steemcleaners or @cheetah will have a much larger impact on keeping Steem a place with great content. Even @berniesanders should have an easier time downvoting overvalued chart analyses without sacrifying his whole stake of Steempower.
Possible exploiting tactics
Of course there is a way how this reward method could also be exploited:
In order to escape the upvote/downvote penality with higher rewards per content - people could start splitting their upvotes on more and more content and start spamming the blockchain.
In my opinion this will be way more costly and time consuming than exploiting the reward pool today. It could be countermeasured with more community-driven downvote services and will come with a much larger reputation lost.
Final words
This proposal shoudn't be perfect yet - but could be a good starting point for a discussion.
I really love the idea and vision of the Steem blockchain and wanna see it succeed - so we have to reflect ourselfs if the reward pool distribution today is perfectly designed as it stands now for mass adoption.
The proposal will be one of many other things, I'll do to further improve the Steem ecosystem - if you like to support me, feel free to join my project SteemHQ.com Community Witness and send one of your witness votes to steemhq.witness - you won't regret it.
If you think this proposal is worth for a discussion please resteem it to your follower!
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors
This is a very interesting idea, especially if it can achieve the desired results.
My suggestion for upvoting is :
a:) when upvoting other people content :
every person's vote should be worth the same amount regardless of steem
power (and one person should be able to vote for other people content more than couple of times
a day . if you like somebody's content you should be able to upvote it)
b:) when self-upvoting , take steem power into count and maybe limit the number of times per day ..
in another words , everybody would have some chance to make money plus you would avoid having 2-3 power players upvoting each other and earning 100's per post ...
Hey @smide-tv,
thanks for you feedback - it's always good to get more ideas and input on this topic.
My guess is, this it could be exploited in creating hundreds of zombie accounts and farming upvotes this way and the voting bot situation would only get more worse. Just my 2 cents.
that is true , but there must be some way to fight those zombie accounts
I like this idea. How common is it for their to be forks that allow new rules to apply to the platform? This seems like a particularly big change.
As a newbie, I've got no problem with big changes, since I'm not exactly comfortable in a well-worn groove on here. But folks on here a long time may be threatened by the idea of any change to something as fundamental as the rewards they get.
I've seen some witnesses who create long-form content that obvious takes some real effort making well over $500 per post. So this would negatively affect their earnings, as well as reigning in the abusers. Still, as you said, even if it isn't the final idea, it is good to start thinking along these lines.
Maybe like this, but then at a certain breakpoint the rewards for upvotes start climbing again, so that anyone with really a lot of support can be rewarded for that.
Hi @indigoocean,
thank you very much for your feedback on this.
In order to implement such a fundamental change, it would require an update of the Steem software, all witnesses are running. The current version is 0.19.2 - the main release is called HF19 (HF stands for Hardfork because the change in software isn't compatible with older software versions).
So to answer your question, hardforks happend several times a year in the past, so there would be possibilities to push those changes into production.
Afaik the feature scope of the next hardfork (HF20) is already defined and will bring SMT (smart media tokens) and improvements on the account sign up process.
Thank you. I appreciate your taking the time to explain all that.
I like this idea and find it interesting. I assume that lost rewards are returned back to the reward pool? Such an implementation would definitely curb bidding bot use and would encourage a more decentralized distribution to smaller accounts.
There aren't any downsides that I can think of right now. Sure, a bad actor can create a bot-net and farm horizontally, but they can do that now. This would eliminate a lot of vertical farming of rewards by larger users. I don't ever expect something like this to ever get implemented, but I think that it could be a useful addition. Although, I also want to see if someone can find a good attack against it.
Hi @greer184,
thanks sharing your thoughts to the proposal.
I really hope we'll see even more reviews like yours from other Steemians in order to bring it to discussion in a wider audience.
Thank you for the contribution. It has been approved.
You can contact us on Discord.
[utopian-moderator]
Wow! This makes a lot of sense. Steemit is a great platform but there’s a long way still to reach a good community point.
I’m seeing more and more users’ suggestions and this is what will drive the change.
Thanks for this! You have my support on this one :)
GREAT frickin idea. I would love to see this happen. (especially since I'm a 27 rep still) day 3 on steemit and 2 for utopian. This is the first post I have read and I hope to see more like it. Thank you very much for this effort.
Absolutely excellent. Re-distrobution of the reward structure is imperative for encouraging new members to stay. This is a good start but dont think it goes far enough, Im not sure what else could be done though. I was shocked at the 12% retention figure being bandied about. I personally would also like to see a 4 post a day limit reintroduced to stop outright spamming as well as people using the power of the downvote to hit bad content. Problem is people are scared to flag people with higher reps which i think also needs looking at.
Excellent community work. Thank you
Hi @nathen007,
thanks for you valuable feedback!
I totally get the point with people scared for revenge flagging. That's why services like @steemcleaners are totally essential for the Steem ecosystem - today and even more important in the future. These services could operative way more effective with a reward distribution model described here, in my opinion.
Totally agree, steemcleaners do a brilliant job, poor buggers must be at it 24/7!
Everyone can help. I pretty regularly use the reporting page:
https://steemcleaners.org/abuse-report/
Anyone can use it. If you see abuse, report it. You'll get a tiny reward for your effort too.
Hey
Ok, i think I understand correctly, and this would make sense in some respects.
My main issue would be (if I understand correctly), is a user with many accounts downvoting a post. Would the above mean that each account in the trail would carry more weight to bring the post down?
I like to see concepts for change/improvement, cheers!
Many accounts downvoting a post wouldn't be a problem at all - because a downvote would cause the total payout for a post go down, which leads to more effective upvotes and less effective downvotes again (depending on how much voting power was used by the downvoter).
So multiple downvotes in a row would be become less effective with every downvote. From a voter perspective it really doesn't matter if you use one account with a large downvote or hundrets of accounts with small accounts - the result will always be the same.
Hope that was kind of understandable :D
@steemhq, No matter approved or not, I upvote and support you.