PRACTICAL THINKING. — Getting something for free and paying to get it aren't always alternatives. Fun and games with second price auctions. Strategies to improve signup for Steem and other new publishing platforms.
Most incompatibles aren't really incompatible.
We ought . . . to improve the signup process for steem . . .
Here's how I think we can do that.
As usual what most people imagine are alternatives are not alternatives.
Getting something for free andpaying to get that something are not really alternatives.
@themarkymark posted a link revealing significant problems with the signup process to use steem.
@samueldouglas has also found similar account carousels and windmills that use steem.
Scammers and spammers make thousands of accounts with 15 SP delegation each. All approved in minutes of each other, in some cases. These accounts get total > 500000 SP in delegation and ring upvote themselves.
With a fixed rewards pool this is at cost to honest users.
At cost to content producers. Who generate the proof of brain.
Meanwhile real users waits for a weeks for accounts. That's not good.
Real users have to create accounts, giving some of their own steem. For honest users who want to join, but can't get approved soon enough. Before they lose interest.
``There are some things that must be done quickly or not at all. [Like] if someone asks you if you love them you cannot hesitate.'' — Mark LAWRENCE, Red sister, London: Harper Voyager, 2017.
In logic this is called a rate calculus. Much like other systems operate with thresholds, like neurons. Some systems operate with rates, like thresholds.
Let's call this the LAW17 rule for the present.
Correction. Steemit, Inc. hesitates. How's that working out?
So in Discord I was chatting about lessons learned with the current platform with some other programmers, when I was hit with a dose of silliness and decided to punish myself by reading the trending page. The trending page which is mostly shit, as everyone agrees.
And lo, there was the article. So.
I pinged @themarkymark on Discord in one of the servers we're on, while I read his post.
Asked him his thoughts about how to make the sign up process less gameable. There need to be no pure dominant strategies with nasty side effects.
He suggested:
eliminate Steemit, Inc from that process.
;)
Well, that's one option. It is one option:
- Let existing users either use some of their own steem to create an account for acquaintances they know, or for their friends.
- Let other users buy minimum usable accounts.
Let the Steem, Inc. faucet create and delegate to accounts they freely create for prospective users.
I suggest with option (3) gone that this also is not fast enough for people near the indifference line regarding using and not using steem and front ends like Busy and Steemit. The idea would certainly reduce the prevalence of scam and spam, but it too violates LAW17 for the honest user.
You don't want to annoy too much the honest user.
And what do I suggest? I'm so glad you asked . . .
I'll tell you what I suggest. It's a good idea, I think.
Let's have fun. Fun.
With second price auctions. Let's use second price auctions.
What's that? What're second price auctions, in this context?
First let us introduce such things by way of pointing out a problem on the trending page. What's wrong exactly with bid bots having most SP in a proof of brain platform combined with a the trending page . . .
The problem is using first price bid bots on every post will catch on and lead to winners curse (Richard THALER, The winner's curse, Journal of economic perspectives, 2(1):191–202, 1988.12).
But if you don't do it on a post, it doesn't trend.
Lose/lose.
(You can skip this part: So far as the platform is concerned professional content creators will not switch. They want to earn by making content, not paying to post content. Some are celebrities. They already have followings and active subscribers. The main attractiveness of using Steemit instead of Facebook is the lack of censorship. The rewards are there, first of all, to create the incentive structure for decentralized archiving. Nobody throws out money. Content printed on money is archived. But that doesn't work if the money isn't worth much, and if there's little content being added to increase its worth. The weird tit-for-tat and pay-to-spam, spam-to-win strategies dominating the site are keeping the value of steem relatively low, user retention low, etc. There are 200,000 more accounts now in March than in back in December. But according to bandwidth, there are fewer active users posting content.)
: /
Right . . . Well . . .
Auction structure is also a technology. Exactly like culture, language, just about everything, is a technology.
We people are tool users; we appreciate new tools.
Thaler got Nobel prize for this — if I remember correctly.
Let me check . . . Yeah. He did; he got a Nobel.
^ How to get a Nobel in social science.
^ Observe; repeat.
^ Note to self.
The same goes for advertising, when that's combined with the fact that almost nobody has the resources for an above threshold search. So they don't search at all. (See Al RIES, Jack TROUT, Positioning, New York: McGraw Hill, 1981.)
Returning to the subject of bidding for exposure when everyone must do it, because bid bots have sufficient or more than sufficient stake on the platform. And stake controls exposure on the platform. Which is a proxy for user participation.
You overpay, basically, if you buy trending position by a bid via an auction for a vote, and win. And if you don't get trending position few persons will bother search. You get no exposure. If you want exposure, you pay more than the position is worth to you, when you win. But if you want exposure and to get paid by producing content, you lose. On average. As the trend catches on — as happened in advertising in the broader world.
The solution is to use second price auctions, which are known in literature to reveal values (William VICKREY, Counterspeculation, auctions, and competitive sealed tenders, Journal of finance, 16(1), 8–37, 1961.3).
I suggest Steemit, Inc. continues giving delegations, but with one caveat.
This requires a hard fork, new code. But it should be code that's easy to write.
New accounts created by the Steemit, Inc. faucet must, without a time limit of a month, bid in a sealed second price auction to keep their account. Something like that.
Otherwise it becomes inactive.
They will bid what it's worth to them. And no more and on average no less. Because they want to win.
Some classes will result and Steemit, Inc. will reward bids above a threshold with a larger delegation for a month.
A few accounts will produce no content, but will acquire Steem in other ways, once they have an account. Others will ask their friends who know them. Effectively vouching for them. Yet others can have friends pay for their account and initial steem therein.
By the way, here's a fun idea: — Bot owners, have you ever considered using Second Price auctions for bids on you bot? It's know to lead to no Winner's curse, though in the short run the operator of the auction earns less . . . Users should prefer to use your bot . . .
Using second price auctions and switches existing during month 1 there are strategies that can disable entirely spam voting rings. Deincentive them. For starters. Incentivize honest users. That's the next step. A major problem is that due to bid bot concentration even thousands of SP are basically ineffective. A proverb in Japan is that if I'm your shadow and you're just a shadow of somebody else, then what am I? Maybe some auction solutions exist for that, coupled with some review, review of review, etc, system for content.
I'll be updating this post as time permits. There are some strategies for auctions.
#creativity #science #writing #creative #technology #life #publishing
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ABOUT ME
I'm a scientist who writes fantasy and science fiction under various names.
The magazines which I currently most recommend:
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
Compelling Science Fiction
Writers of the Future
PRACTICAL THINKING — LATEST — RECENT — POPULAR
FISHING — thinking about tools and technology
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License . . . . . . Text, illustrations, and images: @tibra. #thealliance symbol is by courtesy of @enginewitty.
Thank you for your post. :) I have voted for you: 🎁! To call me just write @contentvoter in a comment.
Ty
Great ideas and reflections here @tibra. I just came across you in our Steemit Mastermind discord group. Glad I did. We need more positive game changers like you to keep the Steemit commUNITY flowing so everyone wins. Upvoted, following, and supporting 🙏
Ty
I think you make a valuable point that gamifying or incentivizing sign ups would help get more sign ups. Some ways to do this effectively would be to:
Implement a referral program that benefits both the referrer and referree.
I would think to remove all automatic delegations from Steemit Inc would be a good idea to improve the quality of sign ups. Or perhaps, limiting it to a time frame of say 1 month which is enough to get some posting done and earn some SP or invest.
It would be cool if there was a newbie market which listed new accounts for others to randomly delegate to if they like their content. That would reduce dependence on Steemit Inc for new user Steem Power.
One problem is that folks don't really grasp this is a crypto wallet. It should be thought of as an investment, not employment. The way it's marketed doesn't help at all.
I suggested on another set of comments yesterday the benefit of making new account signups peer reviewed to cut down on spammer signups. Although that's only doable at the interface level. However, even the Anon faucet is an interface and lots of spammers sign up there.
In response to your article, users can sign up their friends using their own SP through Steem Connect, eSteem, the Vassel wallet, and other methods. Although usually that means your accounts are linked and that can cause some issues sometimes.
Most of the time referrals aren't considered independent accounts unless they're made through Steemit Inc or the faucet or a script on the chain everyone recognizes as being independent. Otherwise, accounts are created by you.
Each account is only a wallet. It just happens that Steemit created a social interface that interacts with Steem Blockchain wallets.
Also, the next fork makes signups very easy. But I have no idea when that is going to happen.
A referral program that benefits for the first several months the account referring and creating the new account, which also costs them, is another option, if properly balanced.
Agreed.
``It would be cool if there was a newbie market which listed new accounts for others to randomly delegate to if they like their content. That would reduce dependence on Steemit, Inc for new user SP'' and limit spam sign ups, if Steemit, Inc delegation is removed after say the first twenty votes or five posts by the new account.
This idea has merit.
Several mechanisms might be combined and superposed to make a solution that is optimal.
Exactly. And I think there are other ideas out there that would help as well. Perhaps a problem is there is no one central place (that I'm aware of) where users can suggest features or petition for features. There's a lot of people with similar ideas and asking similar questions but not aware of each other's conversations.
Contact @r351574nc3. He was thinking of something related.
And he's also a witness.
I think delegation to new members can drain away based on conditions and perhaps even increase for other members based on crieria.
Yes, this will have to happen, I think. My post was about making new users bid for continued delegation at the end of the first month. Possibly increase delegation, but failing that, to end the delegation.
Some people suggested alternatively making account creation almost instantaneous and waiting for delegation, not account creation. That would however leave many unusable accounts and confused new users, I think.
the account can happen immediately and you can receive daily delegation rewards growing the initial stages slowly while confirming the users as real :)
I'll have to think about this one. Question is how to confirm real users of course.
Somebody controls 10000000 accounts. They can just upvote one account by another via scripts. Permutations.
Moderation of course doesn't scale, and moderators may dislike some real users but honest users (you like cats, he likes dogs, etc) and each other, leading to weird decisions.
Also new users still have to receive some delegation in this case to begin using the accounts.
This might be combined with second price auction bids to keep increasing delegations.
And bids get redistributed. Supporting valid delegations and accounts to flag phishing and spear phising and other clearly bad actors.
I was thinking they can bid for higher delegation, if they produced content that was upvoted. This would allow consensus to set the price for delegation, and rings without content would suffer attrition about delegated to accounts in the process. Can't as easily be gamed.
But increasing over time delegations on top of that, for a few months, except in certain flagging conditions might be a something to try, to experiment with.
What do you think?
The ideas that come to mind when I read this is:
If you look at steem there is scopes.
You can look at posts as the smallest scope. Posts are what what you want on steem when a user is active and each post is different from the next, unless you evaluate them by bigger scopes.
Then there is accounts, accounts are generally a bigger scope of a posts activity, your bad accounts will be very likely to remain problematic throughout more than one post, rather than creating one bad post they would typically create many, same goes for good accounts, they tend to stay good.
Then there is groups, groups of accounts indicate that we can possibly draw higher conclusions than the stream of posts that an account producers, there is the stream of accounts that groups produce.
So while groups are difficult to always determine we have accounts to go by, so beyond rewarding posts with votes, one could look at producing phenomenon that rewards accounts that look promising.
Beyond that we can say that if you become a member of certain groups, it might be fair to receive the attention that other group members have. So we could look at maybe software that allows groups to host movements that fund member participation, and so set up guilds where exceptional new members can, instead of receiving the curie trail vote, get bonus delegation and capital incentive on a more permanent basis alongside invitations to group memberships for more permanent boost for good members, which widens the gap between good users and abusers.
I think there is a lot we can do to create guilds and groups that boost good members, decentralizing the moderation effort so that groups of relevant interest can self moderate and use their group power to create footholds for certain communities on steem.
In some arenas up to date information is a major thing, steem has a way of featuring new stuff that if we simply establish communities that reward information that is totally new, we'll already give steem a huge boost as a network.
This above is good. Was thinking about such things for academic publishing as well. Check out the last part of my post from a week ago, the channel update one for my subscribers. It describes a way to generate group specific tokens without further encryption / decryption and that can be used to give delegation within a group and by exchange rates between such subtokens for better or worse groups convert to tokens usable in other groups.
This can boost new accounts producing good content. Combined with some sort of second price auction mechanism for delegation this might do the trick.
This is actually a really interesting idea and I hope someone with the power to do something sees it and considers it. If anything it is an interesting jumping off point for other ideas.
Ty @juliakponsford
Would be interested to hear your ideas as well.
I think for things to get rolling some kind of community consensus would have to develop through public discussion and feedback.
Thank you so much for elucidating on this!
I did disagree with one thing...
"Technology acceptance takes years. And it takes decades for the new to become the mainstream."
I believe this "acceptance" only requires reaching the tipping point. As we observed with the facebook takeover, this only took a few years before myspace was left a ghost town.
It's about creating the sexy UI and implementing many of the issues you are bringing up. I pray that this platform will thrive as it was intended, but it's going to take a lot of change. I'm here and present to contribute what I can to this evolution. Time will tell if this can be viable in the long run for our most exquisite visions of possibility!
Ty @alexstacy
I discussed technology in the sense of a new paradigm. Facebook instead of the forum or chan. Plain paper copying instead of lithography, Youtube instead of the lecture hall.
The prospects of change are better within a space — within a paradigm.
A few changes can improve the platform quite a bit. They simply are not being made . . . If you know programmers what want to work together to solve some of these issues . . . bring them into a conversation like this one.
Everyone is waiting for other people to solve problems . . . and that leads to issues in the logic of collective action. And then not much is done.
Indeed the same Steemit without the trending page and a delegation to new users that lapses after three months, something that simple, would be a major improvement, I think. It's simply not being done.
Do you agree?
I do. I think the trending page could be great, however, if it was better curated.
This is super interesting for me to read as a newbie. I think steem users sponsoring others with their own steem is a great idea - have just done that this week to bring my 13 year old daughter into the steem family. I love that these bigger discussions are happening and that you put the time and energy into improving the platform and the way users interface with and experience it. Gratitude from me over here in Laos PDR tonight.
Ty @artemislives
Yes, users sponsoring others will always be one way to create accounts. Account creation is built in the system, for all users. So anybody can create an account for another person if they give some of their own Steem, always an option.
The faucets are for users who don't know anybody, and poor, or don't want to, or can't get btc to get steem to buy an account created by somebody else. For technology adoption must always be a way for complete newcomers to easily and quickly try the new technology, play and practice.
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``18 SBD worth, 73 votes''
Part of your algorithm is solid.
It has exactly 73 votes now (but only 0.36 SBD worth . . .)
;)
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