Potential Payout Changes with HF 19 Launch
I have gotten a lot of questions from people about the potential impacts of HF 19 on payments. I would like to clarify as best I can.
I want to make one thing clear though - I have tried to understand this as much as I can, but there is still a lot of uncertainty with how this will all play out. There is complex math that is over my head, and there are unpredictable changes in user behavior that could make things go either way. Nothing in this post is 100% for certain.
- The hardfork is not resetting the rewards pool again. Payouts are not going to go down to zero again, like they did after HF 17/18.
- At the time of the hardfork, all active posts (posts that have not received payout yet) will be switched over to the new linear rewards curve formula. Potential payouts will change. Most likely what we will see (this is not known for sure) is that posts that have received a lot of larger votes will likely go down in value, and posts with lots of smaller/medium sized votes will likely go up in value.
- The total amount that is paid out in the days/weeks right after the hardfork may fluctuate as the blockchain re-calibrates the voting averages using the new curve. It is possible that there may be a dip in reward payouts, but nothing as extreme as HF 17/18.
- The whale voting experiment will be ending once the HF occurs, so whales may start voting with full voting power again. This also may affect the total amount that is paid out as the blockchain re-calibrates to the increase in voting power being used.
- After the HF occurs and payouts are on a linear formula, a user with 1,000 MV of voting power will now only have 1,000 times as much voting power as a user with 1 MV (instead of 1,000 * 1,000 = 1,000,000 times as much). Users who do not have hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of SP are likely going to see a boost in the amount of influence that they have on the site.
- Casual users (who vote less than 40 times per day) are going to get additional influence, as they will be able to consume all of their voting power in 10 votes per day. The trade-off for this is that the users who take the time to find 40 good posts in a day will see a drop in influence.
My personal view is that this HF will be a big improvement for the long-term health of the platform. New users want to feel empowered and that they can increase their influence on the site by buying/earning more SP. This is key for growth.
See you all on the other side :)
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While this may be good for casuals, it sounding bad for usual users.
Good that abusing whales will loose power though.
It is a trade off for sure. I am of the view that having more value for increasing the amount of SP that you have on the low-end of the spectrum is going to be one of the key drivers of the STEEM price.
The dilution of whale power ever so slightly will lead to more mobility in the Steem price for sure - the Steem price is one to get on before the hard fork. Lets hoover up all that cheap Steem before the minnows start biting!
I always thought it was an issue of fairness.
Im sorry but in what way whales loose their power?
I'm all prepared for a massive drop in influence! My VP is currently averaging ~50% from a couple hours of curation every day, so ready to see it dip down into single digits within a few hours of HF19. Sadly, this hardfork means the death of active curation and collaborative curation. With 60,000 posts and comments to vote on, 10 is basically nothing. Will be 100,000 soon, the rate at which it's growing. When the HF19 was proposed, this number was 10,000. So it's a very flawed limit, really.
All power to the casual minnows, then! I just hope they don't keep piling on votes for Trending articles / auto-vote bots etc. (They probably will)
This will be a very significant change. I was linked to a trending post that misunderstands the change. The voting landscape is such that a majority of the votes come from minnows and dolphins; most whales are inactive. (even before the experiment) Essentially, the minnows will start squeezing dolphins and whales from the reward pool.
You can solve the 10 votes problem by lowering your voting power.
With 2 MV I am not a dolphin by any means but I will keep targeting posts with a small amount of votes. One month after HF 19 I will re-evaluate my voting strategy and the ratio of my liquid steem vs my vested steem. Let's see how this works out.
That's the best way to do it! Vote on posts with low rewards that are great and have a chance of getting more votes.
You should be able to say vote with 25% instead of the now 100% power and other than the square difference it should still be the same no? Just a thought. Use 1/4 of the power you would normally use.
Like I mentioned elsewhere, yes, but my influence is being diminished. Either way, it's beneficial to take your voting power down as low as possible, as each vote costs less the lower your VP.
those who has high VP will have to start from the beginning after HF19. The voting strategy would change. target would be those post which has fewer rewards/votes.
I like this and might try
It is a hard decision to make between the power-curators and the casual users. In a way, it is a zero-sum game between the two parties (in the context of this parameter). I do agree that this is a big hit for people like you that take the time to actively curate. I know there is a lot of doom and gloom surrounding the HF, but I don't think it is going to be as devastating as people are making it out to be. We need people to take the time to hunt out good content, but we also need a large user base to feel involved with the site. Being able to vote on content and influence rewards is one of the biggest aspects of the site, and it needs to be something that is appealing to the masses.
@timcliff
that's scary for #1 then
am curious about what the effects of #4 and #5 would be.
Thank you for this post!
For #1, I am 99.999% sure :)
Me too!
I'm optimistic, and understand why these changes were made. My only concern is that now that minnows have orders of magnitude increase in influence, they need to be aware about how the curation rewards system works. Since my posts on curation rewards, I've chat with dozens of newbies both here and chat, and it seems painfully obvious most would simply pile on the votes for trending posts thinking that's where the rewards are.
I'd consider leaving comments and downvotes on overrewarded posts urging minnows to curate responsibly after HF19. I know that'll be extremely unpopular, and I'm happy to stop blogging for a bit as this will make me vulnerable to flags en masse. But I believe it is crucial that if the power were given to the community, they be aware about the system and learn to curate responsibly. My posts don't get much attention, I'd be grateful if more influencers like yourself get the message across. :)
With Subcommunities, discoverability will increase a great deal, so I'm not worried about posts being lost like they are now.
PS: Whales have to learn to delegate responsibly as well, and not just their friends.
PPS: I'd like to see a dynamic voting target that scales with activity. Making 10 votes will be no good when the community has a million posts.
I like your "PPS" idea to set voting targets based on activity. I read a lot of posts and leave a lot of comments, as well as votes. And I vote at my maximum power for all those posts and comments. I guess I'll have to set my vote power to some percentage to have the same impact after HF19.
You make a good point, too, about minnows upvoting trending posts, especially since we have so many new folks coming on board. If the subcommunities come pretty soon, it might be all right. But until then, oh boy, we may be in for some surprises.
One of the mistakes newbies make is voting on everything like they're on FaceBook. I speak from my own experience here. The tendency is to start off upvote click happy, until you really start reading up and understanding how SteemIt differs from other social media sites. It takes a while to get the brain to shift into being upvote selective, especially when you bounce off here and back over to one of the other sites.
That's true. But then when people get the vote power slider, many go the other way and just put 1% of their vote power on everything -- and have almost no effect again. But that's part of what makes Steemit interesting. There's so much going on, it's like a whole ecosystem.
That is interesting. I haven't reached a level where the vote slider has appeared, so I hadn't given any thought to that side of the equation.
Is there any benefit to the voter in reducing the vote power like that?
meep
It's just that it lowers the rate of using up your voting power. That means you can spread more around to more posts or comments. But each vote is then worth less. Some folks go crazy and set all their votes to 1%. But that means they would have to vote 400 times a day to use all their vote power. And they don't. So they just leave unused voting power in the payout pool, rather than distributing it around.
If you want to collaborate on a 'newbie friendly' guide to curation, I can work on getting it up on the Quick Start Guide. I agree that user education on what to do vs. what not to do would go a long way.
Sure, though I don't know how much we need to load that Welcome page? I'd be happy to collaborate, either way.
There is a section near the bottom with helpful posts from users. We can add it there (assuming the Steemit dev team approves). If you want to send me a draft over steemit.chat I'll review and provide feedback/edits. I think it would be a great post!
That's the best way to do it! Vote on posts with low rewards that are great and have a chance of getting more votes.
Edit: Really weird Steemit bug, the one where the vote seems to go on the comment below. Looks like the comment text box also got caught out by that. Meant to reply to the comment above this by onthewayout.
Resteem :D
You do realize that the voting power slider will still be there? After HF just use 25% power to get current 100% vote. Or am I missing something?
It's a limited reward pool, using 25% means your influence is diminished compared to the curator who continues voting at 100%. So, those voting more will start to get crowded out of the reward pool as their VP diminishes fast.
Yes, You are right. Actually, it seems that this HF has lowered the power of dolphins and whales both in quality and quantity.
This is something that I dont understand much. Can you enlighten me?
I'm still going to curate as much as I can manually... and I'll probably be casting many votes at 20% instead of full voting power. And I will try my best to find worthy lower reward content to bring it up.
I have no idea where my current +/- 11 MV fits in the greater context of whether I will feel like I have more or less influence... but hey, I believe in what Steemit is, and as long as the implementation of HF19 doesn't result in a complete clusterf*ck, it seems like it will benefit the platform in the long run.
Liniair curve I very much welcome.
10 votes per day I think should not have been implemented. Regardless of the fact the VP can be set to some percentage, eg 25% for 40 votes per day.
Trending page: yep, users like to vote for high value posts. I don't know the reasons, but money attracts money, I think that is one of the reasons, regardless what the results are. Another reason could be that those who are on the trending page are users with high influence and SP and a whole bunch of Steemians are trying to get the attention of the users in the top of the value and influence pyramid. I never analysed the voters but too be honest, I think there is quite a few voting ongoing towards same level and higher up SP users. Too many posts of small SP holders go unnoticed; Too many vote bots on high SP holders posts. I wish bots could be prevented.
Same authors will be settling on trending page with much bigger rewards. I wonder what would be the effect of this to the price of steem.
This is an urban legend!
If you lose 2% of your voting power for each upvote at full power, after 10 votes in quick succession, your voting power will be 81.7% (0.9810 ~ 0.817).
I could have made it more clear. Users who vote more than 10 times per day do not use up all of their voting power. They just use it up at a rate faster than it replenishes. After the HF, ten 100% votes per 24 hours (or twenty 50%.. etc) would be the optimal use of voting power so that the user does not run out, and still uses the maximum number of votes.
Well, here is the thing: your voting power does not go down by an absolute 2%, but it goes down by 2% of your current voting power.
So, if your voting power is 50%, after one vote at full power (after HF19), your voting power becomes 49%, not 48%.
So, if after HF19 you vote 20 times at full power every day, your voting power will not "run out", but it will stay around 60%.
20 votes is putting your voting power t 66.7% of its value (0.9820 ~ 0.667) and 60% x 66.7% is 40%, that is exactly 20% less, that you will get back automatically in 24 hours.
Something about your explanation seems off, but I will review.
Well, for 20 upvotes at full power per day, 60% is the initial voting power that you have every day when you do your 20 upvotes in rapid succession.
When you want to do your 20 upvotes at the same voting power, you need to space them equally, and your voting power will be 50% for each upvote:
From voting power 50%, after one upvote, your voting power is 49%. After 1 hour and 12 minutes (= one day/20), your voting power is back to 50% and you may vote again.
These are the two extremes: 50% and 60%.
I discussed it with someone who is a lot smarter than me on curation and you are right. I appreciate you helping to clarify this!
so HF19 prefers an user who made 242354325 free accounts in early days than 1 guy who bought 242354325 STEEM worth of USD/BTC ?
this is crazy to me.
The number of accounts doesn't matter. It purely looks at the SP. most likely the posts on the lower end of the payout spectrum will be making more post HF, and the ones currently on the higher end will be making less. Sorry if the wording I used in the post was confusing.
Thanks Tim , resteeming this one - I'm both excited and terrified at what's about to happen here :P
@ats-david has some interesting thoughts, I've been following his anti-fork posts. They seem well reasoned from an egalitarian point of view.
Will 25% voting power after HF19 be less in SBD than 100% now?
As far as voting strength, 25% after the HF will be the same as 100% today. As far as the amount of SBD it is worth, that part is a complicated formula and it is not really possible to say without a lot more information. In some cases it will be more, in some cases it will be less.
Thanks for the update and explanation, Tim. I feel hopeful that it will all work out for the best... and that the linear rewards curve will automatically take over where the whale no-vote experiment leaves off. I feel a little concerned that there will be less incentive to curate... but I guess only time will tell.
Agreed.
I hope that this amendment will make the payout. It is sad to see quality content only cents. The frustration among the new users is on the increase.
Success takes time and is earned. I understand the frustration at earning .01 for my posts, but I persevere.
That is the right attitude to take. One quality post may earn only a few cents but at the same time attract 3 to 4 followers. Once you have more followers your payout will slowly increase.
Perseverance is the key to success.
New users need to put their skin in the game, so start commenting, engaging, and building a base of followers WHILE posting and doing all that, and those that are in it to make a quick buck from curating or writing an opinionated article offering at best regurgitated phrases and examples and little to any substance in the form of critical thought and facts, or spamming on other topics, or simply spamming "good article", they aren't in the same game as everyone else.
and they should buy some steem power too.
Rome is not built in one day and success at Steemit require both hard work and patience. Where possible new users can be given some assistance to help them succeed.
I feel pretty good about my content and some of it only pays pennies. The thing is that not all good content takes a long time and not all content that takes a long time is good, and even if your content is good, you may be sending it to the wrong audience. So when I get 9c for a post that I worked hard on, I dont take it personally.
This is a good attitude to take. Building reputation and followers take time. We should take a long term outlook.
Just like any investment, social media is always a long-game. Luckily though we're early enough that we get to enjoy / provide for a rich community.
In this case, the early birds really get cans and cans of worms.
THANK YOU @ positivesteem, I've only been on here for the past three days, and I've posted a few articles and seen many different amounts of potential payout and have the same amount of upvotes/comments etc. Is there a reason for this? Followed @timcliff and @positivesteem. Keep up the good work!
It's partially because, in the last 2 weeks, active daily authors has moved up by 6x. Price has only doubled.
That's a reduction to 1/3rd of the previous available rewards prior to 6/1, if evenly distributed. I suspect either Steem will have to rise in price, or we will lose a lot of these new accounts to this frustration soon. (Then again, can we really expect more than a few pennies for content when we are new with no following?)
Yes there is a reason for the different payout amounts even though your posts may each have the same amount of votes. It's because it depends on WHO is upvoting your posts and how much Steem Power and status that they have. Otherwise you could just create 100s of accounts and vote up your own posts and get rich.
Not all votes are equal.1 vote by a whale may give more payout than 10 votes by minnows.
I agree... @timcliff should accept rewards on his posts, unless it is one picture, one video or one sentence. But the thought that goes into these posts deserve compensation for time spent creating it.
I get compensated through my witness payments. When I post something expressing my views as a witness, I feel like accepting payment is 'double dipping'. I make more than enough from my non-witness blog posts as well as my witness pay, that any work that I put in to the platform 'unpaid' is still well worth it.
I am a noob here and I have to admit this is a lot to take in. But I love how complex this community is and how everyone here is striving to make it better by imagining and discussing together to create the best social media experience for content creators and viewers/lurkers. I am not sure what is to come of this HF19, but I enjoy reading about it and I enjoy reading everyone's comments even more. Thank you for the informative post.
Dont worry, Im also having hard times understanding all the discussions here. There just to complicated for me :)
thank you for the explaination @timcliff . that is a great news for a new user like me to get a feeling like having a better influence toward comunity more over to those who we really connected to (new user with small SP).