RE: Only-Upvote-Others-Athon - Join Up, It's Free :)
This is an excellent post that leaves unstated the struggle for the soul of Steemit. Will Steemit be the social media platform that empowers the world to transcend the replacement of human work with automation, or will it be just another pump and dump, discarded after the maximum profits have been wrung from it?
Either case is possible, and many, many more. In the end, unless the code is changed to preclude the mining of the rewards pool for profit, Steemit will remain a means of concentrating Steem in a handful of accounts, and content creators will languish with the tiny fraction that reaches them.
HF20 is about greasing the skids so that huge numbers of new accounts can join Steemit. However, HF19 reduced the available votes per post by 400%, and many are now self voting out of desperation, since there are fewer votes available, which further reduces the votes available per post.
Adding a bunch of new accounts, to flounder and seek support in an increasingly noisy environment, already starved of votes, will result in much discouragement in short order. I reckon we should make their way ready, before bringing them in.
Steemit only gets one chance to make a first impression. Once folks are discouraged, they are unlikely to return.
What do you think about having 400% fewer full power votes a day when there are 1000% more posts now than there were when HF19 was first discussed? What will the effects be of a massive influx of new users in a vote starved, post-rich environment? @liberosist has proposed ~100 full power votes (which would prevent bots from voting more than people), before VP rapidly decays to zilch. Would this help?
Thanks for keeping this issue up front, where Steemit needs it.
Edit: it should read 'reduced available votes per day by 400%' not per post. sorry!
I suspected less votes were being applied because more people were upvoting themselves instead of changing their vote percentage, which I suspect low SP accounts don't have that yet. So then why isn't that enabled by default? Then people could actually use a 25% upvote, if they knew that's how things worked.
I think another solution to simplify would be to make the default 100% vote, but have the slider go to 400% (the current 100%). Then that retains the previous measure of voting power people are familiar with, rather than divide it by a factor of 4 yet still use the same measure of 100% while it is a different power. That would help get more upvotes around, even if the self-vote is still enabled on the blockchain.
Thanks for the valued feedback as usual ;)
Unless you have 500 SP, you don't get a slider with which to change vote percentage. All your votes are at 100%, which means you only get 10, before you have to stop and let them recharge for a day.
Again, bad development of features on Steemit.com. It promotes new users to continue doing what they already did. Just keep using 100% even when you get the bar, because there is no info on how the power works. No info for newbs. It's been an issue for over a year, and still not section on the site for how things work...
Steemit is in beta. It should be. There are those (obvious from the financial manipulations ongoing) that just want to maximize short term profits, and I think they are pushing hard to open the floodgates to massive adoption.
I don't think those parties so pushing for short term profits care a fig for the long term success of Steemit, or anything other than their quarterly returns, and this is a threat to Steemit in the long term.
This is why I strongly believe Steemit should first ensure that it's present userbase is widely satisfied (per capita, not per SP) with Steemit's rewards mechanism before opening those floodgates. I care not a fig for my quarterly profits, but do care very much that Steemit succeed in the long term.
There are a lot of things that are attempts to mitigate the weighting of VP by SP, and the slider is one of them. As @baah just replied in another conversation I am having "as long as curation of content is for profit, manipulation of curation for profit will happen", and mitigation cannot succeed.
That's an interesting proposal (from @liberosist), but how does it improve the user/bot ratio.
I'm trying to be as honest about the potential and the difficult learning and earning curves here with potential users and newbies (myself included).
Well, right now our VP starts to decay after only 10 votes, beyond what can be recharged each day, but never goes to zero. People can only vote so many posts (substantively). I averaged over 100 votes a day, until I read the white paper and learned that my VP could not recharge until I stopped just voting for what I liked.
So bots can vote thousands of times a day now, and each vote, while of low power, will deliver rewards. Bots can mine much more SP from the rewards pool than people now.
Under @liberosist's proposal, bots would no longer be able to mine more rewards than a person, because VP would decay to nothing. Their ability to keep voting 24/7/365 would no longer be an advantage over people, who can read and curate only ~100 posts a day (YMMV).
Since the number of posts has risen by about 1000% since HF19 was first considered, and HF19 decreased the number of votes we can cast by 400%, the result has been the desperation you can read commenters here expressing, and resulted in self votes - which further decreases the votes available per post.
Increasing full power votes to what people can actually cast, and limiting voting to what people can do helps to keep curation a human activity, rather than susceptible to rewards pool mining bots.
It also helps to throw votes to new users, and this helps to encourage them to stay and build the community, which they will not do if they can't get votes.