Bloggers: Would you mind sharing 50/50 with those that upvote you?
You will earn 33% less, but some believe that incentive will make a lot more people vote for your content which will make you more money than you currently earn today.
I asked my fellow co-owner of STEEM and fellow witness and stakeholder, @smooth to dumb down the salespitch for us, so here we go:
The Pitch
by: Smooth
Curation is broken. A too-large and increasing portion of the reward pool is going to self votes and paid votes that bear little to no relation to quality or value brought to Steem
As a dedicated quality contributor, this is hurting you.
By making a set of changes, including (but not limited to) changing from a 75/25 to a 50/50 allocation between posters and voters, we are attempting to shift the economic incentives away from this sort of self- and paid-voting and toward curating on the basis of a high quality, high value contributions as determined by a system better turned to measure stakeholder consensus (as opposed to unilaterally-decided self votes and/or paid votes)
As a dedicated quality contributor, this would likely benefit you.
Can we promise that the 33% decrease in gross rewards will be made up for by a combination of a) A larger share of rewards going to your quality contributions; and b) Growing the value of Steem thereby increasing the entire reward pool (including your share)? No! We can not guarantee this but we think it is a very plausible outcome.
We also believe that doing nothing and continuing the failure of its premiere feature (stakeholder/voter-allocated rewards used to promote growth) will likely result in Steem continuing to stagnate, and likely continuing to decline in value. Your rewards will decline with it.
End of Pitch
So, now that you have read the pitch as an opening page, what do you think, please write your pros/cons below.
Sincerely, in all friendliness.
@fyrstikken / @fyrst-witness
Stakeholder & Gatekeeper
NB: None of these eventual changes would happen until after HF21+ and SMTs. FYI.
This post is because of this post: https://steemit.com/witness-category/@cervantes/witness-consensus-status-to-fix-the-actual-steem-s-economic-flows-eng
I might upvote some of your comments for visibility, that does not mean that I agree or disagree with you, only to lift what I consider important comments from less important/trollish comments.
Will not work - my response to Trafalgar here.
https://steemit.com/steem/@sirknight/sirknight-re-trafalgar-help-fix-steem-s-economy-20181027t090306085z
Pasted below.
(Consider firstly) 80% of the reward pool is going to plankton, minnows and dolphins. This is far better most economies of the world.
There appear to be many orcas and whales happy to spread the love.
Communities are popping up all over the place.
Once SMTs arrive many Steemians will care more about other tokens than a Steem utility token anyway.
But the main drawback in your idea - why would anyone want to post when they are only receiving 50% of the reward showing on their post? This would turn more people off than it would attract. If anything 25% of the reward is too much.
It also won't solve anything - if the bad actors want 100% - your plan just means they don't have to work as hard to get it.
I don't see any problems here that won't fix themselves with the natural redistribution of Steem as people come and go, plus the introduction of SMTs.
I think you are wrong about communities too. They make a big difference.
A single whale can't change the whole system. But they can make a difference to many. And with discount accounts they can now start onboarding them too.
I really haven't followed your career here since the days of the Steem Wars - but Team Australia is still going strong and now SteemChurch too and this is just what I am doing.
If you genuinely want to make a difference and build the value of your investment - get on the ground and use your capital to create opportunities for the newbies. (Perhaps you are - I just don't know so sorry if I am wrong.)
Cheers.
SirKnight.
SirKnight.
Posted using Partiko Android
Upvoted to counter the downvotes. Because why not?
Upvoted simply because you are awesome @emrebeyler.
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I want to disagree..
50% of 100 dollars is more than 75% of 10 dollars... 25% might not be enough for most voters to be incentivised to vote more on content they see... as I wrote further down I am more concerned with people then voting for garbage as 50% could be enough incentive to do so... so there should be some idea to attract people to high quality content...
I don't understand where you are getting these numbers from solarwarrior.
Regardless- there are good whales who spread love and think of the long term success of the platform - and there are those looking for short term gain at the expense of the platform. 25/75 or 50/50 makes no difference to their behaviour anyway.
But over time the influence of the bad actors will be dilluted as they sell to the good actors.
So don't change the system and is my advice.
SirKnight.
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I assume (and yes it is just an assumption) that 50/50 will increase the motivation to vote enormously...
of course I can not proof it... but just look how many people create self voted garbage.. hence I believe there is a high likelyhood they say.. hmm. yes.. 50/50 is fair... I am getting paid for my interaction... so lets do it
It increases the incentive to vote but also (by design) shifts the incentive away from voting for yourself (100% under any of these setups) and closer to voting for others 50% vs. the current 25%. Voting for others is still smaller, but by a lesser degree. We expect more downvotes on (a baseline smaller number of) exploitative self votes and vote selling to make up the rest of the difference, unleasing a large wave of new votes for the purpose of curating and rewarding.
agree
It shifts the incentive away from voting for yourself by insisting that a higher minimum percentage of your votes is used to reward yourself.
This continues to be nonsensical at every turn.
When voting for yourself, 100% goes to yourself. It can't be any higher than that.
What matters here is the balance between the alternatives. Both 50% and the current 25% are clearly still less than 100%, but 50% is a lot closer. Therefore balancing the incentives becomes more within reach at 50%.
A more extreme alternative would be 90%. At this point the benefit to self voting is only 1.1x and far less likely to be worth it. We'd likely see hardly any farming/self-voting at that point because it wouldn't be worth the risk of getting your trash downvoted for that extra 10% when you could be an average or even slightly below average curator, find some non-garbage and go vote on it.
We're in favor of 50% because (unlike say 90%) it is a moderate and the pain in terms of author reduction is relatively modest (33% reduction) relative to the increase in curation (100% increase) and therefore it is a number that has a good "return on investment" (using that phrase figuratively) when it comes to shifting of incentives.
I don't understand where you are getting these numbers from solarwarrior.
Regardless- there are good whales who spread love and think of the long term success of the platform - and there are those looking for short term gain at the expense of the platform. 25/75 or 50/50 makes no difference to their behaviour anyway.
But over time the influence of the bad actors will be dilluted as they sell to the good actors.
So don't change the system is my advice.
SirKnight.
Posted using Partiko Android
Downvoted to counter the boomerang vote. Comments shouldn't be artificially boosted. @phoneinf
Hello @therealwolf and @phoneinf. A pleasure to make your acquaintance.
Just so we are clear - this Knight does not use bidbots or buy votes etc. So either the manager of boomerang liked my comment (who wouldn't really) - or someone else liked it enough to nominate it for reward.
This Knight is not concerned about the downvote - he is however concerned about his reputation as Steem's most LEGENDARY blogger... who doesn't use bidbots.
I am... SirKnight.
Upvoted for entertainment and charisma, but downvoted the above since wolf's downvote looks smaller than boomerang and I agree that paid votes on these sorts of comments are dumb.
@sirknight, please copy/paste in the thread to keep it organized, please.
Done.
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Very good reasoning, @sirknight, and I would like to add two more points to it:
It is hard to believe authors of a quality content would fare better with 33% less reward, while the number of votes is still limited.
A rule of a thumb would be: More curation rewards, more of the reward pool goes to the bot operators. That would hardly stimulate authors or even new members.
I still think that the greatest improvement to the system would be an implementation of bot-checking system, or we shall soon have…
This is stellar, thank you.
Thank you tcpolymath - just presenting my view. SirKnight.
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This post has received a 5.9 % upvote from @boomerang.
Thank you boomerang.
Because it is a lot more than the ZERO that they get if they don't post (other factors might enter into it such as legitimate posts getting more votes than before or Steem being less dysfunctional and returning to a growth trajectory, but we don't even need those to answer your question).
This is not true. It currently takes essentially NO work to self vote or sell votes. Can't get easier.
Down-voting SirKnight, up-voting SirKnight - very smooth Smooth.
This Knight has responded to these points previously, you will find the responses floating around blockchain.
This Knight's point has been made. If system changes he will adapt and so too will the communities he manages.
Again - SMTs will solve many of the problems that you and others are so concerned about.
More to the point - why the concern? Just keep building infrastructure, communities and discussion and the STEEM price will take care of itself.
SirKnight.
Posted using Partiko Android
Steem is infrastructure. We work to improve it. That's why we have 20 hard forks already.
That doesn't discourage or dismiss all the other good work you mention. All working toward the same goals in different ways.
Hardfork 20 is fantastic! Thanks for all your hard work Mr Smooth.
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Hard No.
Great comment
Downvoted to counter the boomerang vote. The comment is solid, but it shouldn't be artificially boosted. @phoneinf
"Comments shouldn't be artificially boosted." how is it any different to posts be boosted? Everything is artificially already then. You can boost posts. You can not boost comments? How is it any different? You can already do it if you had more accounts. In the end someone boosted something for visibility.
I'm fine with this.
And here's my solution in case @lukestokes wants to come along and criticize me for offering nothing but objection again, even though this plan, in fact, deserves nothing but objection.
It did make me think about things more and come up with something better, I guess.
"Wants to come along and criticize me" sounds pretty negative. My intention is not get personal or criticize you or anyone in particular. My intention is to move things beyond complaints into solutions. Thanks for contributing ideas.
I don't find the UI curation scenario very plausible. UI beneficiaries have very questionable economics since they discourage the most successful posters from using them. DTube gets away with it (and a lot else) because it is subsidized by the large free stake from misterdelegation.
As a longer term approach I'm not seeing it as viable. A small UI tax aligned with UI operating costs and feature value add might work but not pulling out enough to meaningfully redistribute it.
So you don't think users will leave the whole system because they're giving up 50% but you think they will refuse to use a beneficiary-driven system because they're giving up 50%? How does that make any sense?
If there are actual users who actually want 50% and believe it will give them benefit, this gives them the opportunity. If there aren't, then forcing it on them is clearly a bad idea.
Because it is easy to use a different UI that does basically the same thing minus the 50%. You don't need to leave.
If 50% itself actually benefits users, then they will use it. Right? That's your entire argument on this whole topic.
No that's not really the entire argument. I would refer you back to the @kevinwong and @trafalgar posts. They lay out an argument in greater length and detail then we can sensibly do in comments. I've rehashed some of that in my replies but not all of it.
Let me try to summarize a different way. The goal has nothing to do with how much is paid to individual users and more a matter of system health. It is is to shift the incentives system-wide so that self-voting and vote selling are no longer economically incentivized. There are of course broader long-term goals that that, but that's a minimum starting point because as long as they are so strongly incentivized they result in a race to the bottom where none of your initiatives such as meta-curation, UI-based redistribution, etc. will work because as more and more of the reward pool is drawn away by those broken incentives it then becomes inaccessible to you (and everyone else). That's where we have been heading and the race to the bottom continues.
"Self-voting and vote selling are no longer economically incentivized" so you basically want to remove freedom and implement some communist control system for what people do with their stake. That is what it sounds like. Just skip that idea. Let people have their freedom. People invested let them use their stake freely. If people want to self vote let them do it. As long as not something goes crazy. There are always extremes.
Okay so you look at people self vote. But you are completely missing the other side of how many that gives in a selfless way without any ROI focus every single second. You are basically looking at human nature and want to try to fix it. Selfish people will be selfish in any system you do. People reflect themselves. I see love and beauty on Steem Blockchain since I follow selfless people.
It's not the system we are dealing with. It's human nature. Most value for let's say dtube video creators is not coming from high Stake holders. They want to leech 50% off the big value that dtube gives to real content creators. Since the Steem share out was a mess in 2016 it will take 5 years to make things more balanced to real content creators. The real truth is majority of people are just not good content creators and never will be. So they are confused about their role here. So they want to leech 50% from people that are amazing.
I have a better solution before any radical changes are being done. First people need to wait for a niche + community system. Where people do solid content for specific niches. So everyone get's what they want. A moderator system for specific niches would be good. Narrative is trying this. At the moment most people are just derping around creating whatever. People that wants to thrive needs to find their niche and use a solid content strategy.
Radical changes ---> Usually someone is unhappy in life. Radically change something will never work. Most high Stake holders needs to find a project or something they can invest their life into. Instead of trying to leech off of content creators. Content creators have more leverage than Stake holders in the long run. Since they have limitless supply of original content.
I will strongly disagree with that. There are literally hundreds of users here building projects because we believe that we have a path to success. I am 100% confident that mine will be fine if you stop attacking it.
The reward pool that matters cannot be "drawn away" but it can be driven away. It is the stake that is in the hands of the users who participate here because they want to participate here, and as long as that subset of the reward pool continues to grow, what happens to the rest of it really doesn't matter.
Those users should be supported, not attacked. You're a much larger threat to that right now than anything else.
Mildly downvoted since I agree with wolf about boomerang. The comment itself is good argumentation even if I disagree with the conclusion.
Is this a rule or what? A stake holder boosted something, someone put capital behind something for more visibility. You can already do this in other ways with posts already. I can take the same comment and boost it in a post. How would that be any different? I didn't boost any crazy comment but a rational clear comment. If it's not allowed to boost comments. Why is it then allowed from the promotion service?
Not a rule just an opinion. That's the nature of voting systems, people can disagree peacefully. Let the votes fall and carry on.
Yeah thx for a response. I'm just testing the network :-)
I would say capital is a very good indicator to see real opinions and real proof of care. That a message can get empowered with capital is true freedom. Since someone is investing more weight behind something. Empower a message shows it's more important than ROI or Money return. I have seen more of your comments and think you have a very nice balanced look on things which is nice! I feel too many come to conclusions too fast ...
Keep it up :D
Thank you for the kind words. Nice chatting.
Did you observe that @therealwolf could have downvoted to match the Boomerang vote but instead left a remnant approximately equal to his own upvote? I had assumed this was intentional.
No big deal either way really, but it seems like if that was his intent it's worth respecting.
I didn't pay that close attention. I applied a small downvote to express my opinion that messing with comments using paid votes is stupid.
Well, we've found some common ground at least.
Upvoted to counter the downvotes.
This post has received a 14.61 % upvote from @boomerang.
Also. remember app fee's are not being included in anyones talks about this. You will have even less than what you think you will be getting. Applications with image and video hosting won't be free. No fee's no media.
So how this works is.
Edited: Curators gets cut first, then you share the rest with apps. So the content creators will get even less.
yeah thats lame!!
As a content creator I can easily understand that reliable long term storage of Terrabytes per day and fast bandwith is a cost factor. Pay the bills first and then distribute the rest to author and curators. That sounds logic and fair. But to distribute fifty:fifty author::curator doesn´t make any sense. It would not only clearly lower the quality of posts, but also lower the number of outstanding posts dramatically.
I might be mistaken but I was under the impression that curators get the cut first, followed by the App and then the content creator.
Yeah sorry, a bit of a mix-up. So curators would win over content creators so it's not really 50/50. Because content creators have to share with apps.
As someone who was initially drawn to SteemIt by the promise of 'infinite rewards from paid upvotes,' and then taken down a notch or two by downvotes from actual people on the site - I've learned the lesson that SteemIt shouldn't be taken for granted as a money mill, but instead the reward ratios should somehow be reworked so that the 15% apparent rewards on paid votes become nil or negative.
I'd also learned that renting SP and botting out my account as an automatic voter doesn't help the bottom line and proves to be a negative sum game, so I'd assume other people that get excited about 'free money' will be happy to play with paid votes - and we see this constantly, time and again on 'trending' and 'hot,' whereas there are less people renting SP because it's a 0-sum or negative-sum game.
Two cents!
If we're going to discuss taking rewards from content creators from the Reward Pool and giving it to curators, then there should be a discussion about implementing a system for different sorts of curation types.
A binary upvote system that makes someone a curator is also the issue that makes the curation system weighted by the upvote-bot issue, which is why this discussion is being had to begin with.
There are different aspects to curation, which is ultimately determining whether something is quality content or not. Here's a non-exhaustive list in no particular order of importance of the curation process :
The point of this list is to show that humans, not bots, are much more involved in the process of curation, and the specialization of that curation should be rewarded by the work put in.
Perhaps an unofficial position, or a curation reward breakdown process which people can get those specialized positions for the work they put in to earn those curation rewards. Maybe positions like Curation-Witnesses.
At this point, I'm just spitting out suggestions. So the curation isn't so binary: if you upvote you get rewards. If you don't upvote you don't get rewards.
I am fully in favour of the 50/50 split. I am also hugely in favour of getting rid of bid bots. I think they create a system of laziness and excuses. People no longer need to be on the platform, they can just sell their votes and make a profit, I don't think it should be that easy. For the sake of the platform we need people here, interacting, socializing, creating and curating content. When I first joined last July it semmed like there was a ton of interaction going on. 16 months later it seems like everything has become automated and it stinks of stagnation. 50/50 split would be a great start to have people curate more, but there are also other things that need to be addressed.
and maybe also ad incentive for resteeming?
Boosting curation rewards also helps increase incentives for resteeming: Vote first then resteem. All of the votes that come from your followers add to your curation rewards. If the post goes viral your curation rewards could end up being huge (of course this latter scenario really needs a much bigger Steem user base, but we can dream right?)
agreed ;-) but I still think it would be a good sign to have a kind of resteem reward pool on top of the curration reward... you always get what you incentivise... ;-)
You are aware that even more people will do auto curate if you move it to 50%?
@tcpolymath look at this and let fyrst know your concerns. I’m tagging you both in each others posts because you are both questioning.
Thanks.
anytime, i hate to see smart people like myself feel down it makes me FUD and sad ...
It does nothing but incentify more people to delegate to bots.
You can't fix human laziness except with some strong stringent rules.
Heck, ill gladly delegate all my stakes to a bot if I see my rewards slashed by 33%, i currently get less than $2 for my posts except oracle-d posts.
I get peanuts from curation.
Netcoins contest showed that we have less than 10k people active on steemit, fix that, not this idea of giving more curation reward to whales and bidbots.
This is once again a case of steemit inc and witnesses totally in touch with the low users of this platform and why I think other platforms are watching and waiting to take over.
If a whale can get more rewards from his delegation to a bot, he will do so, rather that. Getting fewer rewards from self-votes.
The one thing yall need to do is have a roundtable discussion with the whales once in s while and speak on the growth of the platform, how to move forward and delegating their stakes.
This is now tilting towards centralization kinda..
I wouldn't mind profit sharing.. We already have curation rewards but that only really is lucrative for those with large SP holdings.
Would be an interesting project to have a bot that sends little thank you transfers for voting on a users post.. Hmmm.
Which likely ends up looking a lot like a higher curation percentage with more on-chain overhead for all those transfers. Golos had (or has, I'm not following it any more so I don't know) such a bot which implemented 50/50 (I think) curation in this way (I guess posters would need to prefund the bot or something) and became very widely used. Many curators would decline to vote on content that wasn't signed up with the bot, so many posters would use it (or not get votes).
Yes, the 50/50 bot on Golos is still operating, but is less popular now, because some more sofisticated services came.
The most powerful one, which has accumulated about 10 million Golos Power, allows you to send any amount of Golos or GbG to it along with the % of this amount you are willing to give to the services investors. The curation trail then votes with GP according to this data.
There's sort of auction, the trail votes for submissions with biggest % suggested for investors first. While people are saying that you have some chanse to get an upvote with 60% for curators in the middle of the night, the average figures are more like 85-90% for curators.
The most popular idea on Golos now is to embrace this system, allowing for authors individually to set any % for curators . There's an old and long Github issue about it.
https://github.com/GolosChain/golos/issues/324
Thank you for the update.
@smooth, that 50/50 communist bot on golos, I remember that one. I was running booster over there at the time with @inertia. What happened was that a small elite with a lot of stake became business unfriendly, so stakeholders with businesses on golos powered down, sold out and I do not think it has recovered since. For a more technical analysis of the whole golos meltdown, @inertia sure must have some fun observations. We did business there for many months, it was very educational. I hope we can share what we learned from Golos some day, so we do not repeat the mistake of becoming unfriendly to businesses.
our accounts on golos was coinbank and booster. If you want to see the blockchain or run simulations.
Hmm, right on, thanks for the share of info..
I'd not really considerd the overhead on the network.. Need to get back into considering all aspects of a design I guess before tossing out ideas.
I was in golos for a bit but have since then stopped using it as well.
You should make more to curate. Like it should it should be competitive with self upvoting we should make people want to full 100 percent upvote others instead of themselves. This is the stuff that is really broken with the platform, and it could be fixed
Shouldnt the first step be "becoming more effective at curation?"
before cutting author earnings?
Nothing is broken. Life is competitive that's all. Either you have amazing content or you don't. Most people are not amazing content creators as it's an art form that takes a long time to master. The idea that something is broken is wrong. The Steem Blockchain code is working fine. Human nature will always be human nature.
What the fuck does that have to do with anything? The argument is its far more profitable to self upvote than it is to curate, so there is no incentive to curate. It doesn't have anything to do with quality of content.
How is someone coming here, upvoting 10 of their own comments and leaving better than them coming here and curating? You are really in a bubble to say the system isnt broken phone boy when the first question the media asked our glorious leader Ned was why does trending suck so much? Why does it suck? Because the system is broken and there is no incentive to upvote good content
You are wrong. The main ROI is in Trust and Relationships. Not the Token itself. I upvote and curate to leverage Trust and Relationships. Clearly that is the biggest leverage you can get.