OPEN LETTER TO STEEMIT INC., THE WITNESSES, AND THE WHALES
I've been doing a lot of considering and pondering lately about a serious issue here on steemit.
A certain issue has arisen lately, and I think that a very reasonable solution is possible. Concern has arose within the community about one particular account specifically that posts many, many times per day and is receiving a good amount of rewards on every post. @Berniesanders once tried to make a deal to decrease the frequency of these posts, and more recently @fulltimegeek, @hendrix22, and others have attempted to rally a downvote effort to counteract these particular post payouts. Personally, by my own evaluation, neither of these efforts have had the desired effect thus far, so I am going to suggest a solution.
PAPA'S SOLUTION - REINSTATE THE LIMIT
Back in the old days of steemit, there was a four post per day (24 hour) limit. If we are honest with ourselves, I do not think that anyone would claim that they need to post more than four times per day. I do not want to see smaller minnow and dolphin accounts destroyed by entering a flag war, and I am suggesting to steemit inc, the witnesses, and the whales in our community that some discussion on this matter take place.
Ultimately, people are prone to abuse freedom. If we limit the freedom, we remove the opportunity for this kind of abuse, or at least greatly decrease it by limiting the possibility for it to occur. Rather than seeing a frustrated community, I'd like to suggest that you consider making a change to include a limit on posting frequency.
Again, this is simply an idea that I had, and I'm open to other suggestions, but this seems like a permanent fix to this type of behavior. Feel free to reply below with your thoughts. Thanks for your time.
Also, just prior to posting, I just did a quick search and saw that @hitmeasap shared this same idea a month ago. (great minds think alike?) Unfortunately, only 66 people have seen that post thus far. Hopefully this one will get more visibility. If there is anything that you can do to increase the visibility of this post, please do. Thanks everyone!
Until next time…
Don’t waste your time online, invest it with steemit.com
FOR MORE PAPA-PEPPER CONTENT, CHECK ME OUT ON SOLA
I agree that there is a problem but those who issued the hardforks have made it difficult to agree on where we made the mistake. The 4 post limit did prevent abuse, but not completely. It was prone to Sybil attacks as we saw from steemsports at the time who after having 4 posts trending per day only had to create another account to get to 6 posts trending a day.
@richardcrill and I could agree yesterday on the after party of steemit ramble with @shadowspub that it was one of the 2 main changes of the last hard-fork (10 vote soft limit or linear rewards) that should be rolled back but we disagree on which one. With each hard-fork having multiple rule changes we're left with no clear direction and steemit Inc refuse to even see that there is a problem. As far as they're concerned none of this will matter when they've built SMT's. Steem is just the prototype.
If I could fork steem myself the first thing that I would do is add vote negation, so that abusive voting can be prevented without having to make it a full time job and without causing collateral damage by downvoting the people the whale upvoted.
The next thing I would do is roll back the last hard-fork completely and take one of those changes at a time starting with voting power. Instead of losing 2% of your remaining VP with every 100% upvote, you would lose more voting power when voting on posts with higher payouts than you would voting on posts with lower rewards - discouraging the pile-ons that the exponential reward curve encouraged.
What this would mean is that if you have 100 accounts with equal SP that make up the size of a whale, each vote after the last would become more powerful in adding rewards to the payout (that was how exponential rewards worked). However, the accounts that voted first would lose less of their voting power than the accounts that voted at the end when the payout was already high. This means whale accounts voting at 100% would be slowed down more than minnows voting for posts with low payouts at the time of the vote.
This is because I believe the linear rewards curve was the wrong solution to a problem we were already having. Too much power in the hands of a few who could set up a bot to vote 40 times+ a day on the sure-hit content, leaving no incentive to vote for new members on the platform and completely dictating the distribution of the reward pool on the same authors all the time without regard for user experience.
Whatever this comment gets paid though, it was still a waste of my time because the CEO of steemit Inc is not listening.
I know you are always interested in new suggestions, and I wonder what you are thinking about my (already rather old) post concerning the reward curve: in case it wouldn't start linear, self-votes on 'empty' comments were less profitable. Therefore my suggestion is to let the reward curve start as n^2 and end linear. You can find the complete reasoning here.
(Very interesting is also this post from @clayop which I found later.)
Yes I absolutely agree that if it's feasibly possible then this is what we need to be implementing. The problem is steemit Inc no longer concern themselves with the economics of steem. They want to create a demand for SMT's by leaving steem as the broken prototype. I'd wonder how long it would take for somebody to develop steem cash, a fork of steem. I bet it could come years ahead of SMT's.
This is an astoundingly good idea that I unreservedly endorse. I already hesitate when I upvote posts with rewards over $100, and I feel this proposal is responsive to why I feel hesitant. So much good content languishes, that even when I am upvoting good content that is being significantly rewarded, I feel like I'm failing the platform, and those other good authors that haven't got the traction, for whatever reason.
Thanks!
I'm glad I'm not the only one who doesn't feel the need to always upvote content over $100, even if it is good. The few times I do it, I'm giving it the $0.10 I feel I would have given it if I were among the first there.
It's sad that with all the algorithms and hardforks that there isn't a way to incentivize human curation rather than trying to get there by discouraging the opposite. I don't have any better answers. It's just a lament that everything has to be looked at from the gamification point of view.
How about posts that have the "extra" of solving a captcha to prove they are "humanly curated" get an extra payout or something? Because I agree--"science" (behavioral psychology) tells us that rewarding behaviour is the most effective way to promote it. It's called positive re-enforcement. "Punishment;" namely, a method which reduces behaviour, is not as effective. In other words, "Kindness Wins--" or, at least that's the idea ;))
Your captcha idea is interesting. I wonder how many of those I would have to do before I got tired of it, though. Is there a way to do that where I don't have to constantly prove I'm not a bot, but where the bot fails the test everytime? :) In other words, something that puts all the work on the bot and not on me. :) Then, I'm in.
I don't think so... That's kinda part of it--proof-of-brain--every time I'd imagine. But I'm sure some smart person will come up with something :) . It's really not so bad, imo; especially the ones that you just have to check a box--take one second. At the end of the post, check the box, then it permits you to post.
I suppose. I can't remember now, exactly, but there was something I did a while back that required a series of captcha answers to get through and it was just plain annoying.
We're agreeing though that something that allows humans to differentiate from bots is a good thing. :) I'd prefer not having to do anything else because I'm the human and don't feel like I'm the one who has to prove I'm human, even if it is a simple and easy, fraction of a second box tick. :)
Here is how you fix it:
#1. No more auto-upvoting. If you want to upvote someone, do it live.
#2 Limit the amount you can upvote to your daily upvote value (weighted by your level) 3x for minnows, 2x for dolphins, 1x for whale. If your daily upvote is worth $3.00, that's the max you can upvote, either all at once or spread out over 300 pennies.
#3 Throttle back self-upvoting to no more than 25% of your daily upvote value.
The losing a higher percentage of VP when voting on higher rewarded posts sounds like an elegant solution, but wouldn't this serve a 'redistribution function' more effectively if it was combined with linear rather than exponential rewards?
Even if the CEO of Stinc isn't listening ATM, it's still useful to work through the alternatives in case he ever does, or for contributing to alternative platforms... this is still only a test after all!
No I think linear rewards have proven to create the wrong incentives for everybody. As suggested by @jaki01, something in which starts out linear and gradually becomes exponential is probably best. But I think we would all appreciate one change at a time so that we can properly evaluate the results before moving forward.
Whatever you do, please do not fork into a directly-competing "Steemit cash"-like because what such a thing does is devalue both branches. I contend that ideally we should insist and bring more and more compelling arguments until finally Ned listens
By then the competitors will have won. I wouldn't waste your time on somebody with all the invested interest to listen but with no sense when the advice comes from an ex partner.
I wasn't partner with Ned. I plan to go to Steemfest 3 (and I hope he will come, too). I'll seek him out and try to persuade him. If the arguments are good enough and repeated often enough maybe there's a chance he'll begin to consider ? I don't know but it's worth trying.
Yes there's a risk that by then the competitors will have won but what we should rather focus on is: would creating a "steem cash" - like fork do more good than harm or the opposite ? How does that risk (of a fork proving actually detrimental) compare to the risk of "competitors winning before Ned starts listening" ?
I don't claim I have the answer to the above but my gut feeling tells me that the latter is lower than the former; I don't know Ned's propensity to listen but the risk of diluting the steem brand seems so high to me that I wouldn't take it (as a shareholder who's invested above $15K of own hard-earned money in steem)
We started this experiment with a whole raft of measures carefully tailored to prevent abuse.
In the time I've been here, I've seen them all
discarded; like prophetic seals in some sort of cheap supernatural horror movie.
Now the spectre of widespread abuse has surfaced and everyone's wondering what happened.
Just out of interest, dyou have any idea or inclination of which of these @dan supported and whether their abandonment had anything to do with his leaving?
Edit: This was a response to a different comment. No idea why it ended up here.
I couldn't speculate, tbh.
I tend to deal in ideas; rather than people.
I don't know who pushed for what and why, I just see what isn't working and give feedback, which is the whole point of beta testing.
I have nothing but respect and gratitude for everyone involved in this project.
Very diplomatic... although on steemit the new rules (hardforks) are agreed on and instigated by a handful of people at the top (it's not a democracy is it!).... and I'd like to know more about their values to give me an indication of where we're headed!
The problem with 'unfettered capitalism' (fewer rules) is that it has a tendency to destroy itself in the long term.
We're moving away from what you might loosely call 'social-anarchism' - which would have rules in place to encourage long-term investment and broader rewards distribution.
With more social-anarchist rules in place (like pretty much all of those that have been removed) I feel this would empower and encourage MORE smaller scale investors looking to make a regular income, but this requires MORE rules!
I'd like to see more rules that empower and encourage stability, equality etc... as I commented below...fewer rules doesn't necessarily mean more freedom!
Thanks for the reply...
I think it's useful to consider that every aspect of the platform is constrained by rules, most of which are code.
Changing the code doesn't remove rules. It just changes them.
It's the specific rule that has particular consequences, so it's not whether or not we have rules, but what those rules are that matters.
There just isn't a way to prevent folks from posting more than four posts, because they can just post from another account. Neither is there certainty regarding the utility of any given code, because the real world throws sucker punches and devs are blindsided by clever criminals.
I'm all about free society. I do think the platform came out swinging for that, and it's evolution since then reflects the influences the real world has impacted it with, including that Steemit Inc. is a for profit concern and needs to serve it's market.
The market for Stinc is the Steem. The majority of Steem is held by very few people, and the interests of whales are vastly different from the interests of minnows. Steemit code starkly reflects that.
Great points well made, especially the last point. Stinc.... is that your invention?
No. Don't remember who did coin it, but I liked it and use it a lot, like I did when I found the word 'enemedia'.
104 week power downs was the worst. A very good way to drive out/scare the investors and making Steem low value.
50/50 author/curator rewards split was the best rule. It brings out the best content yet people become lazy to produce the content.
Ironically, one of my reasons for originally buying 5000 steem was the knowledge that my co-investors would also be locked in for 104 weeks.
104 weeks is a bit excessive. 52 is more reasonable.
Yeah, but what happens if a very expensive medical emergency, disaster happens, or you die (God forbid) within those 104 weeks of waiting? The droplets of Steem you'll be getting per week would be of little or no use.
Maybe it would not be so wise to invest that much money into Steem if you cannot afford medical care without powering down?
Frankly, this is going to depend severely on what country you live in.
@darthnava's personal experience with this is a perfect example.
If I was concerned about immediate liquidity I could buy literally any other crypto. Or invest half in each.
Maybe you are right. Thanks for the chat.
Hope you're doing well, mate :)
Depends what kind of investor you want. The get rich quickers or the active holders who genuinely believe the future not just for themselves but for the platform. Fact is there are more of the first kind available in the crypto world and in my opinion choosing them is us being impatient with the better option.
well it is more likely for the active holders to switch to the dark side after seeing rampant abuse and no actions from the powers that be who are capable of bringing some positive change, rather than the rich quickers turning over a new leaf... steemit can be so much more, but unfortunately the delegations, support go to the wrong places and valid suggestions fall on deaf ears...
Maybe I am misunderstanding here, but do people really think that the people producing the content, and the people who find that content deserve the same payout? If you always follow someone who you know puts out good content, then you are always somewhat riding on the coattails of that hard work right? I mean it takes a lot less effort to upvote something than it takes to create something..but that's just my two cents...
the main thing that a 50/50 split author/curator does is it puts the "brain" back in "proof of brain". Currently what we have is "proof of upvote bot" or "proof of selfvote". Check out the content on the trending pages... all vote bots and self votes. The current curation reward payout is so low that even a very skilled curator, who spends a lot of time looking for quality posts, has a hard time making more than 2 SP weekly per 1000 SP of voting power. The financial return from selling your SP in form of delegation to a vote selling service is WAY more than that. 50/50 reward split would be great for minnows, there would be a lot more motivated curators specifically looking for good posts that nave little to no pending payout, because those posts yield good curation rewards. Check out @abh12345's weekly curation league reports to see what curators currently earn. It is peanuts.
I have slowly been dragged kicking and screaming to agree with you. This comment in fact is the best, most concise explanation of why the rewards for the curators are just as important as the rewards for the content creators.
Damn reason and good sense! I so want to retreat to my former position that it's ludicrous to value the act of upvoting a post to the work that goes into creating it, which seems obvious and incontrovertible on it's face.
The truth is that valuing the labor of creation of a work is a trap. It isn't the labor of writing that is of vaue, but the content of the ideas therein, and the act of delivering value to those ideas, curation, is no less integral to the process.
You sold me. I here publicly apologize to all the folks I've disagreed with on this matter in the past, because I was wrong. Thanks for planting the seeds that have eventually prompted my growth.
If curating aka voting early actually did move quality posts into visibility then I could get on board with the idea of splitting the author/ curation rewards 50/50 ... fact is, it doesn't. If you want to find quality posts you look at the posts of the curation projects that actually review posts for quality and posts about them.
Those projects put the brain back in the proof of brain not early voting.
If you mean the 50/50 reward split, each post only has one author, and multiple curators, many of whom I'm sure the author would like to see rewarded for their support.
I guess. I mean, I typically support the people who follow me by upvoting their posts and comments. I don't expect to make anything from "curating" their content. I think that what someone earns on upvotes should primarily go to them, especially since it's so hard to get upvotes for most people as it is. On top of the fact that a lot of these Dapps already take a HUGE chunk of someone's earnings. So a vlogger who spends hours a day uploading quality content is only supposed to make 25% of what they earn? Dtube takes out 25% and this 50/50 would vastly cut into their earnings. I'm not saying curators shouldn't make anything, but again, the difference between hours and hours of work vs. clicking the upvote button are insane!
Would it be hard to get upvotes on your quality posts if heavy hitters were scouting around looking for fat curation rewards, instead of shamelessly upvoting their own crap?
They're going to get a return on their investment; upvoting quality posts should be their most lucrative option.
SBD being an easy pump and dump target just increased how bad the disparity between curation and author rewards became.
Is the solution to a lot of the "woes" here not painfully obvious? Have the same payout options for authors and curators. Curating shouldn't get only SP while authors get to choose whatever is paying the best at the time.
I'm of the camp that curators should get 50% or something around there. Even if some large account holders are bad taste-makers, they're even worse content creators. I really don't want to be on a social media platform where the crypto-rich are literally forced to "create content" and roll out a pile of fresh dung every morning in order to maximize their ROI.
I can feel my mind expand as I read the words you have written.
Thanks!
Yeah, the Dtube thing throws things off a little more, but a worthwhile variable to consider as these ideas are evaluated.
You seem pretty intelligent, I'm going to go see what you've been up to.
The 50/50 reward split was terrible in my opinion for everyone but a very small amount of content creators. The whales just put a handful of people who made non contreversal cookie cutter content on auto voters and called it a day. They could not even check this place out in 2 month and earn a stupid amount of money and since the reward curve was so skewed in their favor they were becoming ultra whales. No one really liked that system except maybe 30 people.
Good point.
Interesting, I've never put as much thought into that as you apparently have.
Yeah not trying to be a rabble rouser, I have just been hearing from a lot of people in the Dtube community specifically lately, and between being perplexed about high quality content being met with totally random and inconsistent upvoting, and crap content being self-voted to the moon through the use of bots, vloggers are getting discouraged, and a few of them have even dropped off. It's true that Steemit owes users nothing, but I maintain that the same applies in reverse. Steemit needs great content to keep people engaged and coming back to use the platform, or to join it to begin with. It seems as though any concern about payouts and upvotes that aren't holly jolly is being blown off as being a negative Nancy, and I don't know if I totally agree with that.
If at this point we also tell vloggers especially, that even more of their upvote amount is going to be detracted, I think a lot of them will leave. It isn't such a big deal for bloggers, but for those trying to use the Dapp interface rather than just copying and pasting YouTube videos, they have to go through Dtube, and are therefore forced to give up that percentage of their earnings, and it's not that Dtube doesn't have a right to those percentages, they are letting people use their platform after all, I'm just not sure how well all of this will go over. Although, people are always averse to change, but then usually adjust, so I guess it's hard to say what will happen until it actually happens! Just my two cents!
I think a reoccurring issue that might deserve some due attention is the problem of those unmoderated vote bots. I know it might be a dangerous statement to make, but most crap post that get high upvotes only seem able to get high upvotes because vote bot owners aren't really moderating the use of their bots in an any way meaningfully way. In other words, the crap producers are actually less to blame for the growing amounts of crap on the platform than the bot owners that allow the same crap producers to to use their upvote service, unmoderated, month after month.
Well, it's basically just putting the advertising model in automated form, and without the sponsor.
My feeling is that automated upvotes are promotion, and posts that are availed of them should be in the promoted feed. There are ways to parse the source of the promotion fee, if hostile promotion pushing posts into the promoted feed becomes a problem.
The crap producers are really a symptom of the problem, which actually derives from rewards pool mining. It is the delegation dealers that ultimately demanded this code. Stinc is dependent on them, and delivered what it's market wanted.
It's important to remember that Stinc serves a market composed of Steem, not people.
Thanks!
Read somewhere else that vote bots were probably under 18% of the pool, so it's not the vote-buyers producing most of the highest voted crap you see, surprise surprise large investors in crypto or devs aren't the creative souls the internet was holding its collective breath for!
You bring a very important point to the table.... or four of them. I'll upvote for visibility as long as we are discussing all of this.
backing that upvote up, cause yep, he's right. Dan built it to last, and somehow, that got shifted back. Why? Do you recall the history? I didnt get here till June 2017, and HF19 was the most monumental shift I have yet personally seen go past. My question is WHY were these rules abandoned and who drove the requests that became the patches and what was their personal motive in each case? Sure, I understand that they were each debated and opted in by the top 20 but to who's gain or detriment?
from my observations ... the same complaints about the end result of the previous rules are being made about the current ones. Some people's memories get really short.
Those who gain are happy with the code. Those who don't complain.
I was thinking of what change could benefit steemit as a whole, without limiting freedom. Maybe something like this:
The distribution will not start until day 101 after implementation. One percent of total will be given per day.
This may not solve everything, but it does give back to steemit. I don't know how easy it would be to effect this change so lets hear from the developers/experts.
This does not address the comment upvote dilemma, but I'm sure it could be similiarly addressed if this idea is technically feasible.
kind of like a graduated income tax? combined with basic income?
It is a tax. And it could be considered communist-like if steemit was a country and we use the tax like most countries do.....wastefully or to line the pockets of the politicians. However, this tax would be used to encourage interaction and engagement with others within the system. You would not receive unless you meet certain criteria. That criteria would need to be determined. I have just listed suggestions.
The percentages may vary, like taking 25% of monetary rewards for the top 10% instead of taking 50%. However, it is a give-back program to incentivize interaction. It is not a charity. It would encourage those with less rewards to keep trying to engage others.
This would also serve as a defacto flagging system, since this would likely catch those persons that have whales upvoting them to the top of the earnings list.
Let me know you thoughts.
Opt in blockchain based taxes are an interesting idea.
I already posted this idea on another comment here,
but what if instead of having a "tax"
Would that be feasible?
I just reread the comment that started this thread.
He called it quadratic rewards.
Perhaps the easy solution is to revert from linear payout back to as he called it quadratic rewards.
It was the opposite.
The bigger the payout, the more each upvote added.
I'vve thought of something that if people who don't post or comment their VP goes down. Then people like @ranchorelaxo with @haejin can't game the system. Because they are just an investor. Rancho isn't here for Steemit Community. He is here for himself. Why should he only benefit himself. Each week he don't contribute by making content % of his vote strength goes down.
If he was here for himself then he should delegate to a Bid-bot and make 500% more than he is currently doing, curating a chartist whos content is as valuable for as long as it takes him to make the post.
You need to wake up & come back to REALITY. He provides nothing worth what he is making. And TRUST ME. He would never SPEND money towards anyone else. Even if it made him money. He only SPENDS his MONEY, VOTES, anything on HIMSELF!!!
You need to re-read my comment!
You need to RE-READ MINE.
Interesting, thanks for adding your insight and input @celsius100!
Now you arent saying "they Never get 50% of the rewards" or "that they go to someone else", you are just saying the reward is delayed?
I could see some merit in that. Interesting to think about!!
Peace
That could be one option I hadn't thought about. Set aside an amount from the top earners each day. It will be theirs, but it could only be used with the steemit platform. Given away to others, as such. It could not be withdrawn.
I would suggest, though, that needy projects should be the ones to receive the donations. Those endorsed, by vote, from the steemit populace. That way, the rewards would not be easily given to accounts of friends and family or themselves (through anonymous accounts). Thanks for your input.
You'd have to rework flagging, because any system like that would create more of an incentive for the smaller pockets to start flagging each other to below any rep cutoffs you set.
I'm relatively fresh here, but I'm for it! Make restrictions, make regulations, make BALANCE, lose the whales, lose the idiotic meme posting accounts...Even 4 post per day is too much I think, in my opinion, 2 at most! And powering down from time to time is in game.
It would be nice to have a curator slide, just like the vote slider but earlier on.
Very peaceful means to combat the problem and avoid flag wars. Upvoted.
I try.
I agree with the idea of a post limit. Personally, I had a hard time following Papa Pepper's suggestion of 2-4 post per day for success on Steemit. I just don't think in that realm of reality. I can't blog of vlog about every insignificant event in my life or the lives of others that many times a day because it doesn't inspire me to do so.
I look for things that have never been said before. Because of that, I have a hard time repeating myself, but I felt like there was a very specific message that I had last fall that people weren't quite getting in general which has to do with the changes that cryptocurrency will introduce to society. Then the only way I could stop repeating myself was to get into the technical details and wrote this way for a bit and realized it was just too much for most people. I found that I was just rewriting the same ideas from a different angle because of this need to post daily at minimum.
So I've been thinking of kicking back to about one or two posts per week when there's something really important to say. I think the monetary incentive is just a little too much for posting multiple times a day and creates more spam. If you knew you had fewer shots to hit the target, you'll take your time and aim better.
I just sent for that same silver hex! @pit-bullion is coming out with a 5 oz
While I reckon most of those things were better abandoned, I do absolutely agree with 50/50 curation split, now.
This is worth the price of admission. What excellent and evocative writing!
50/50 reward split? I spent hours, days to write up my content and I have to share half of it? Why do I even bother writing a 500 to 2000 words post when i can just autoupvote posts. And here i was complaining about appics' reward distribution. 65% to author 10% to company 25% to curators. Video editing can take hours as do writing. As a content creator, 50% is not a good incentive. What happens when everyone just prefer to autovote and no contents gets produced? 80% is a great number to incentivise authors to produce. I think the 50/50 will not fly and will greatly devalue steemit.
50% of what your quality post makes today, probably not; but for 50% of what your post makes if whales were voting for you instead of for themselves, I think you'd continue to grace us with your presence.
"If" whales vote for me. I don't think distribution is the answer anyway. If they can't be stuff about curating who can force them to. If they want to vote for themselves, it is their money after all. If they want to circle jerk each other so be it. I don't think we will find the answer until we test out the waters. Implement something, see what happens. How about a rule that stops a whale from voting their own post?
I am sympathetic to your arguments, as @carlgnash just managed to convince me they weren't as incontrovertible as I'd thought on this post.
Whales can just buy votes from bots. Such a rule would do nothing. It's also how to get around the 4 post limit. Just post from another account.
I'll reiterate here the reason that it's a good idea to split rewards 50/50, since you may not see my earlier discussion with @carlgnash.
It's a trap to focus on the labor of writing or creating content as a guage of it's value. This is illustrated by the old saw about 100 monkeys typing out Shakespeare eventually.
The value in content comes from the ideas presented therein, and curation is the act of delivering value to those ideas via the market. While the act of upvoting is trivial, seeking out good content (particularly on Steemit with it's broken feeds) is a significant task.
Also, ALL the curators split the curation reward, and thus are but fractionally rewarded compared to the author. So the dichotomy isn't quite as stark, except for posts where whale curation might dominate the curation reward.
While it takes significant labor to create good content, it takes labor to produce crap content, and one being rewarded and the other not depends on good curation.
It's worth compensating.
Beautifully well said.
Comparing the effort of writing with the effort of upvoting is looking very superficially at the issue.
If money is a substitute for labour, then the money I have tied up in the SP I use to upvote, is 'effort' I've expended engaging with the post.
In my opinion back then when those rules were in place the STEEM blockchain didn't have much of a future. It was primarily going to be a whale hangout and since the distribution was messed up it was going to be about 15 or 20 whales circle jerking each other passively.
I just saw an @AdamKokesh post
and is actively advertising the heck out of Steemit anytime he posts to them.
Would we really want to limit a man with his talent and followers?
@Haejin claims to have talent & followers too.
Yes. Nobody needs to be posting 6 times a day.
Why not?
Sure but those channels are made up of dozens/hundreds of different shows -- you're not going to see 6 new episodes of Game of Thrones per day, right? And if we could, I wouldn't want that because the quality of the show would deteriorate into oblivion.
It takes time to form anything that has substance, and I just can't imagine a ton of examples where someone could be making 6+ posts a day that gave an audience much value at all.
So I take it you are also against the other frontends to the Steemit blockchain?
I'm not against any frontends running on Steemit, I'm against content that isn't quality, and I don't think many people can put out 6+ posts per day that isn't going to waste my time.
I would love for you to give me an example where someone is putting out 6+ posts a day on steemit and it's beneficial to the community.
I think if anyone can do it, @AdamKokesh could.
I think I read somewhere @steemsports is one of the top paid out users.
(I'm not that into sports...)
Maybe it would be better if they each posted as themselves?
While I agree and support the sentiment, I feel it would ultimately be pointless. It's not hard to create two more accounts and still make the same 10 posts per day. The reason for the 10 posts per day is because it's the maximum amount of 100% upvotes any one account gets per day and they are clearly just milking the investment made by the whale account upvoting those posts 10 times per day. I still believe the only solution to this problem is to make curation profitable so that it's more beneficial to upvote good content than it is to vote for low quality posts. Of course that can be manipulated too and the inherent problem is that greed always finds a way if that is what people feed. Not trying to be a downer here, just pointing out some of the problems I've already thought through on this issue.
There's the rub. I haven't conceived a way to give a financial incentive to good content, specifically.
Any ideas?
@beanz idea sounds like one of the best I've heard honestly. My thoughts all revolve around making curation more profitable than self voting, but the problem we ran into when curation was "more profitable than it is now" but still not more profitable than self voting is that we just had circle jerks going non-stop. Then you see massive whale accounts, some still do this, going around only upvoting each other and creating multiple shitposts per day to use each others autovotes.
Well, I thought of making curation pay more as you curate more authors, and particularly new authors, but I haven't the chops to determine whether there is ever a 'price point' at which circle jerking is less emunerative under such a scheme - that won't break folks that upvote their friends too.
The solution I have come up with that will work NOBODY likes, or will like.
VP weighted by rep instead of SP.
It just ends the problem by removing the cause, which is that voting is a means of producing ROI, instead of supporting good content and driving an exceptional social media platform.
Love it!
Cough, I'm actually guilty of this one. I made a second account so I could post more.
Back when there was a limit.
I love that you suggested that curation should be more profitable. I agree with that one! Not everyone wants to make content.
This was what I thought to begin with. Even with controlling the account creation, Steemit would gain nothing useful and most likely only lose with this.
You are correct, I've been thinking about some of that too since I posted. Thank you for being honest. Thanks man!
Good work @papa-papper
I'm trying @deltasteem, I'm trying....
Maybe we should implement something to make account creation more transparent. Just a thought!
I have a few accounts, but I don't hide the fact that they are for different projects I am working on, including my witness account.
Firstly, I agree, this is a relatively easy way of putting a limit on the kind of abuse you talk about above, and I'm glad you're 'onside'.
As far as I am concerned having an absence of rules* on steemit doesn't mean more freedom, it just redistributes power and certain types freedom (the two are inseparable) differently.
Having no limits on posts empowers and encourages those who want to put up short form content regularly, but also the type of 'extraction abuse' that's currently going on.
HOWEVER, it makes the rest of us less free because we have to devote time and energy to combatting said abuse - IF we want to maintain our share of the limited reward pool (another 'rule' we're all exposed to).
Your proposition (which I agree with) would INCREASE freedom for most people on steemit - by allowing us more time to create good content, and free us from the tyranny of shit spam posts to a greater extent.
*In fact, there isn't an absence of rules on steemit: if you're posting to get rewards through dual-account collusion, abusers are already effectively 'limited' to the amount they can post by the recharge rate: which is 10 * a day.. it's a still a rule... a 'limit' build into the system... putting a hard limit on this wouldn't be so different.
The whole concept of freedom and rules is something that I need to write about at much more length. Sociology can help a lot here: in short: we depend on structure to be free, an absence of structure may make us less-free.
I'll watch closely this post to see if any whale is opened to discussions.
You have to come out with an idea about abussive upvoted comments too!
@jwolf - I guess I did not take into account the multiple accounts scenario either. If a person wanted 12 post payouts per day, they would just need three accounts then.
Upvoted to increase visibility. Just trying to brainstorm here.
I don't know if multiple accounts issue can ever be solved...
A second account needs to recruit its own followers; but that's the only real drawback.
Well, there's a specific example that I think we're all keeping in mind here, and that account receives most of it's rewards from upvotes from one account. It'd be easy to simply spread those votes across accounts, eliminating that drawback (in this instance).
An additional benefit that might have prevented a great deal of controversy regarding that account to having multiple accounts instead of simply pouring all those rewards into one wallet would have been the obscurity that would have provided.
Multiple accounts can be reduced significantly if they were tied to credit cards.
Please, let's not make credit card theft even more popular than it already is.
some people are smart enough to NOT use credit cards
Yeah, you are correct aren't you? People would probably just upvote comment after comment instead.... good thinking and thanks for adding to the discussion.
I have nothing to those who are upvoting some comments a day with $1-$5.
But those over $50 are a shame from my point of view :D
Large upvotes for minnows is a way to help those especially from poor countries where a little help goes a long way
Yeah, some would just shift full power upvotes from their own posts to their own comments.....
Maybe an earning limit on comments?
Yeah, this sounds plausible.
I second this.
I don't. I typically get 3/4 of my rewards from my comments, rather than my posts, and such limits would probably be difficult to design to prevent harming folks engaging on other's posts.
Particularly for new users, doing that is a far more profitable use for their time than posting epic blogs into the void of obscurity most posts fall into.
I'm just eclectic and interested in the ideas folks come up with, and discussing them is educational.
$25 should be enough right?
What do you think?
(Btw even I earn more through my comments, somehow for some reason, people like it lol)
And I see you already proving your point.
Get rid of self upvoting. That would solve some of the problem I think.
Instead of selfvoting, folks just buy votes from bots. It's a little less profitable, as the bots cost money. Not enough of a difference to make a difference though.
That was my initial thought when I read this, that they would just comment and upvote 100%.
Maybe there could be a limit to the amount earned by a steemian per day. But then there's the issue of multiple accounts...grr.
It would be really nice if something could happen to remedy the situation.
I myself, a plankton with best intentions, showed my support for a friends band (the Key of H) on @hendrix22's post and got flagged!
Luckily I was "healed" afterwards by ftg, but still thats just bonkers.
I'm not sure if the flag war is going to solve the problem at hand... If it's all we can right now though, I support it.
I hope we get a great thinker here with an awesome idea that we can implement for a more peaceful resolution!
Thanks for talking about this papapep. It's good to have high profile steemians not sweeping it under the rug and rather putting out a call to action.
Take care.
I'm not sure about limiting the amount any one person can earn per day. I think the recommendation about limiting the number of posts is good, but limiting the amount someone can earn on those 4 posts is somewhat counter-productive.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but I look at your suggestion this way...
I am working in a company for a promotion and that promotion comes, however, they can't pay me more than my current salary because there is a cap, even though it is a higher level position. Get my point?
Who is to say your post or contribution can't make more than this or isn't worth more than a certain amount - to tell you at what point you can no longer earn on something you have worked hard for.
I think limiting someone to 4 posts per day is a good enough step in the right direction.. true... there is still the issue of multiple accounts, but at least it's a start.
I think that regardless of how much I feel I might be entitled to due to my efforts, if it's taking away from other people who are also putting in the same effort I am okay with having a cap on my earnings. Isn't that the issue, that these people are taking too much from the reward pool and thereby limiting rewards for others who are deserving?
I'm out of my element here, just chiming in with my thoughts, I'm a peaceful person who believes in equality on and off the blockchain :)
If the choice is do nothing or limit posts to 4 per day, I definitely choose limit.
yea.. nothing against your idea at all. I just think the frequency is the issue. The accounts in question are posting at almost an hourly interval which means he gets paid out a huge sum of money for something he could have combined into a daily post
Yeah. Man I wish people could jusg be decent and fair. And I do think if we could limit that would be great, just then they'd use different accounts.
Finding a solution is going to be like finding a needle in a haystack but its got to be out there somewhere
Unfortunately, people find ways around systems faster then solutions can be found. That is how it is... always one step behind. The "indecent" always have the upper hand in this rat race we call life
this is a start, and a good idea.. but i think there are deeper issues also .. coincidentally i just wrote a WHOLE post on this.. and even more coincidentally the titles are almost the same! wt*!
https://steemit.com/steemit/@eco-alex/an-open-letter-to-all-steemians-and-especially-whales
(upvoted for visibility)
Wow! Really? I'll check it out man!
thanks for the support..a worthy cause for the betterment of Steemit! IT is a Loaded topic of course and one that i think lots of people have an opinion about.. Peace!
please do feel free to comment on it , if it not to hot to handle! -)
One thing I wonder about as more platforms are added to the Steem Blockchain.... you have Zappl (like twitter) where multiple post would be a natural...Dmania that only post memes which is like the playful part of Facebook. Dtube for Videos. Steemit for articles. Ned said in an interview that he wants 100's of companies like this on the blockchain which would certainly increase the price of Steem which is great. So as this happens, how do you limit posts when there are so many different platforms? It's just another aspect of this as different platforms have different uses. I'm not going to put my life story on Zappl, but then I'm not going to post a meme on Steemit, but I will post it on Dmania which is the "meme and video" platform. All of this shows up on Steemit but it is actually coming from multiple applications. The Steemit world is growing which is a good thing and we are just experiencing some growing pains in the process.
Good point. I hadn't considered that stuff either.
The vote and comment was strictly to make a point and draw out Daniel's long-running, subtextual, subversive intent to compete with Steem, to give the public alignment with his private discourse, which has long been filled with express intent to compete. And of course I will retract the vote.
Dan left Steem expressly to create a competitor to Steem and is advertising it with a supposed “inside track” to the future here on our platform while acting like he is no competitor. And whether he leaves the platform for good today or 6 months from now to join his Steem-competitor depends on if we choose to see through his intentions and care. It’s possible I am making the mistake of caring. It’s hard to really say until these platforms have existed for a while 10 months from now. I would prefer to ship our tokenization platform, Smart Media Tokens (SMTs), which outcompetes any version eos can string together, and get moving without Dan clouding the marketplace. He asked me for the same months ago. This is reasonable and all business. I vastly prefer Steem and SMTs.
It's a bot @uwelang @sircork @twirble
thanks a lot @beanz - wow - not thought of it, an intelligent bot :-)
So now you got a fake account Ned? What the actual fuck? Are you completely out of control with your manic SMT copy pasta paragraph, or is this just a copy pasta spammer cloning you? Either way, its still jealous shit talk from a baby wanna be ceo who cant get a platform interface built worthy of comparison to circa 1994 open source forum scripts. Fire sneak, and shut the fuck up about SMTs till you fix your broken damn house.
Fearless comment of the day =D
Edit: I LIKE the OG interface. As complex as Steemit is, a simple interface prevents one more learning curve from getting in the way of my fumbling along on it.
Are you sure you wanted to comment on this post or a different one :-)?
Bruh have you heard about our lord and savior SMT and communities?
Edit: What's really odd is I commented on beanz' comment, it was during a period of bandwidth issues so I have no idea how this happened.
Good good steemit should welcome the competition. It will help it grow by seeing what others do and stealing their ideas. (They stole steemits so why not)
What about limiting the reward amount itself.
Maybe not a hard limit, but more something like a multiplier, a posting power, that decreases with post frequency and that needs to recharge (like the VP).
you post once, you get 100% of reward but your PP decreases by say 20%
the second post, posted just after the first one would get you only 80%. You would need 6 hours to recharge from 80% to 100%.
For the comments, no multiplier, but a hard limit that comes into effect after say 10000SP and becomes smaller logarythmically as your SP increases: i.e. minnows no limits, Whales limit.
That could maybe be a way to tamper the hijacking of the reward pool everybody moans about, without eating up too much posting feedom.
Whales with bot armies would dance around those limits.
I feel that seeking to impose limits is peering in the wrong direction to find a solution.
I reckon what we should be doing to seeking to incentivize what we want to encourage. Recruit stake by making it profitable to benefit the community, rather than trying to prevent them from doing harm by profiting.
IMHO, the solution to the problem the platform faces is finding a way to incentivize curating good content, but not just the top 1% of posts. We need to acknowledge that we are all on a spectrum of quality, and there is far more value in a community of posters of all levels of skill than there is in one in which only the very cream of the crop receives any reward at all, and everyone else is just a consumer of their content.
So, let's turn your idea in that direction. How about each separate account you upvote increases the curation reward you get by 1%? This encourages single, rather than multiple accounts for curators, and also broader penetration of curation in the community of creators.
Still no idea on how to incentivize curating quality posts, other than our native interests as people.
I hope framing the quest for a solution in this way might help those wiser than I to do so come up with carrots, rather than sticks.
Thanks!
That's a neat idea worth some whiteboard time to see if it works out mathemagically. Humph, had not thought of this one. Good thought.
That's silmilar to how it used to work but the decline only started after 4 posts. It would still be easily avoided with the use of extra accounts.