Self Voting
This is in response to @l0k1's TLDR section of Introducing Smackdown Kitty.
I'll just clearly state my position: Your stake is your stake. You earned it. Use it any way you want.
Is self-voting bad? No. Is it good? No. It's completely neutral.
I know this is just an appeal to authority, but according to @dan:
It is so sad seeing people fight over nothing. The whales who vote and consume rewards from the reward pool only take out of one pocket and put it in another.
You can take the above quote with a grain of salt. But the original context was in response to criticism of how stakeholders were voting with their own stake.
From @l0k1's TLDR:
Self voting provides no information about quality, only peers can be judges, and an individual is not their own peer
False premise. Voting is not about peer review. It is about using your stake as you please.
Self voting resembles arrogance and conceit socially. In Australia we would say 'to put tickets on yourself'
False analogy. It is arrogance to imply that someone cannot use their own stake as they please.
Because self voting diverts rewards from the pool without adding information, these votes are essentially Spam in terms of entropy
False equivalence. All voting allocates rewards. What is the purpose of the "entropy" buzzword here?
Self voting is an incentive to fill up the blockchain with intentionally meaningless posts and comments, and is an ongoing and escalating extra cost for those who run the network (witnesses)
Slippery slope. This would only be a concern if voting was unlimited. It also impies that the platform is unable to scale. Do you have evidence for this? That would be a much bigger piece of news.
To the outside world, it is another thing to point a finger at Steem and declare it is a scam
Post hoc ergo propter hoc. If we cannot use our stake as we please, then it's a scam.
Let's put this in perspective. Somehow, a person with 1,000 SP is going to vote ten times a day and walk off with 2 STEEM every day by self-voting (compounding daily, yes I know).
The really weird thing is, this person isn't going to ever realize that they could make more by voting for other people's good content. You know what? I'm fine with that. Their loss.
@inertia
I believe you are right on in your assertions.
I enjoy seeing so many people spin so much CPU power on this issue; I definitely shows there IS NO ONE RIGHT ANSWER.
I agree with Dan, so sad to see so much time wasted on this stupid fucking argument. But those that persist, I see it as a character defect mostly. Arrogance, and then the list continues on from there...
I'm selfvoting. But don't like it. It's just economically incentivised in a current system, so me and others just do what they must to get profits. And it is sad, cos longterm it's killing the platform ((
You saying:
I belive you wrong, alas. I made about hundred "smart-votes" for other's posts (voting early, predicting good content) but I got about 25% of my vote, nevertheless. Not even one "jackpot" over 100%, not one over 50% even... So it's useless to vote for others (financially) in a current system (((
Learn how to front-run.
Too complicated for me (
Hopefully someone will run the bot and offer a streemian trail to others so they don't have to run the bot.
I will create streemian trail by next week!
come on inertia ive been reading your last posts from lucky luke to the atom look to this...u r so complicated i wanna punch an atom in the proton ..I mean wth is YAML?? please don't hurt me am a minnow lol
it is just plain economic isnt it?
true....
Your argument sounds a lot like 'really people do not benefit from this, but I do, in part because they do not benefit from it'
That's some community, civic spirit you got going on there. I can see how you are going to win this campaign.
Of course, maybe I am reading this entirely wrong, and maybe the abstract does not represent the overarching concepts of the document, but what do you suppose this means?
I see, if you want to interpret the parts I have emphasised in italics very disingenuously, that it does not specify the party whose subjective contribution (vote) and the contribution being judged thereby, is not the same person.
The actual reason why self voting was not banned from day one, is the very flimsy argument that you can just create alts to do this, or you can buy them, so, why not just let people do it directly, since they will do it anyway.
As an experienced computer trainer, I can assure you, that in every computer system design, defaults are vitally important to facilitating beneficial and productive use of a computer system. @personz submitted a request to the steem condenser github, that the 'upvote post' checkbox should be default unchecked. Steemit, Inc, instantly made the change. This has led to a greatly reduced number of small accounts consuming their votes with their posts, meaning they get more benefit from supporting their peers and those who they are fans of.
The reasons to ban direct self voting on the chain, in the consensus logic, is a user experience reason. The moral and social and psychological factors of it looking bad 'putting tickets on yourself', as we say in australian english, is irrelevant, in the big picture, as you say. But allowing the users to exercise their power more judiciously, while reducing the cognitive load, is a very solid reason to do this.
Then the entire platform is flimsy (which I don't believe is true). If you want to combat sybil, you will have to invent a whole new technology: Cryptographically verifiable unique identity
I'm not saying this is impossible. But, like I said, it's a whole new technology. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if someone wrote a proof to demonstrate one way or the other.
Sorta like the halting problem. It's mathematically proven that the halting problem cannot be solved. But you can set bounds to side-step the proof. So even if unique identity cannot be supported by a proof, there might be reasonable bounds.
Interesting idea and good insight. It's something I've been interested in for a while, trustless identity.
Which position is 100% self-consistent? Let's take several iterations:
Iteration #1
Iteration #2
Iteration #3
I believe you are justified in using your stake to oppose self-voting. But I also think it fails the self-consistency test.
You forgot iteration #4
Person A is also basically justifying the position to oppose this change based on claims that the Rewards Pool does not belong to somebody. This is clearly incorrect, because every holder of Steem is paying this interest rate, at a rate of 9.3% or so per year, through the dilution of their assets.
Person B is also, along with many others who they have been interacting with, to consciously not press the button, just because it is there. They are consistently reporting that their conscience and self respect are improved. In stark contrast to Person A, who seems to be reacting to this habit of self-voting, as though the campaign to disable it on the blockchain is something that is being forced upon them.
The self-consistency test stands, I'm afraid. Especially because you have also not considered this as a flaw in the system, that can easily be fixed, and we are doing plenty of work analysing. I would argue that in fact, from a standpoint of a psychological and sociological analysis of the behaviours, as they relate to cognate phenomena outside of the blockchain, demonstrate that your resistance is proof of decadence and corruption, and related to childhood issues caused by being unjustly treated by trusted adult caregivers.
You will find that as you learn more about my position, that I have not neglected to think this through, in fact, possibly to the contrary, and that I have many verifiable, and corroborated well established facts that can be cited, if you like, from psycholoogy, sociology, economics and philosophy.
Wow.
"This is clearly incorrect, because every holder of Steem is paying this interest rate, at a rate of 9.3% or so per year, through the dilution of their assets."
Quote from your answer... If we are all paying our share of the interest, can't we use the stake we are paying for as we want? Why do you get to determine who I vote for with the stake you just said I pay for with my dilution?
Flagged because there is no way that two paragraphs, one being mine, and one, your fallacious argument, deserve a dollar, when I can barely get that on a post I spent two hours laying out nicely, cleaning every typo I could find.
Kurt just comes along and 'swoop' a dollar. If I can identify what clearly is a circle jerk, and that clearly is, I am obliged to treat it the same way as a self vote. No matter how good it is. That was rubbish. Shame on you for playing the dirty game of vote4vote, or circle jerking, whichever it is.
It's fine. Not worried about it. Use your stake however you like. I even voted for it.
To answer this question needs more than speculation. There is a reason why I have got a peg on my nose and I am deploying the fastest single node I know of to build behemoth database query engine for doing precisely the analysis that will give us a nice little graph showing exactly how much the majority, versus the outliers, plus exactly who that is...
You no better answer the question than I do, by your own standard.
I am uncertain why this analytical work has not been done, considering the amount of words that none other than @dan has spent discussing the topic, in relation to reward calculation formulae, and the question of how to ensure that the distribution approaches this equality, while accounting for community consensus about what is quality and what is not, since obviously the whole purpose of having a forum is null and void if you just pay out 9.3%, or whatever the momentary rate is per unit of time.
I agree 100%!
The people have to stop crying and work to earn more SP.
This people that cries is the same one that defends the socialism, Fidel Castro, etc.
Upvoted and resteemed!
This post received a 2.6% upvote from @randowhale thanks to @rtdcs! For more information, click here!
Hi @inertia, I'm a collaborator with @l0k1 AKA @elfspice on this so I'll join in a little here.
If I number you points of contention, I would say #2 (arrogance) is subjective, #4 (spam scaling prob) needs research and #5 (appearance of scam) is speculative so I won't address them.
The other two though I will:
#1 - self voting is about peer review
While it's true that the bottom line will always be we are free to use our stake as we please (I'm a strong supporter of this), for me this point questions the validity of self voting being allowed as it is post-HF 19. It's clear that self voting is more rewarding since HF 19 so this is a problem, so much so that people are overly incentivized to vote for themselves over others.
Our position on this is supported by the whitepaper and while I am not confident I can say what the "culture" of Steemit is, "peer review" is certainly something which I wish to maintain.
From the whitepaper:
So while we can pressure people socially to follow this, the incentives have to be there, and that's the problem that needs to be addressed. Whether you listen or not to the rationale @l0k1 makes before such a change is your business as your stake is always yours. But we are promoting the idea of a system level correction.
#3 spam adds entropy
I agree the usage of the term "entropy" here is quite opaque. It refers to Shannon's information theory, where entropy is maximum when all outcomes of an information producing machine are equally likely. So I guess he is saying that spam is self similar information, and so adds entropy, because the more of it there is the more probable the next piece of information produced on the blockchain is similar.
But this point needs to be developed and I invite @elfspice to do so.
Since moving onwards from focusing on the larger share of reward allocations self votes, to the situation in the Witness schedule, where a smaller share, but a constant rate for each witness during their time in any given slot, and the mutual and self-voting that does not decay, and every vote is multiplied by the stake (which is growing, rapidly, in the case of top 19s), the self voting on the forum is a sideshow, and irrelevant.
Except in that the witness situation means that, second to the founding members of the chain, who mined and mutually voted and self voted their rewards to an untouchably high level, have the power to pick and choose which of some significant proportion of the witnesses may hold their top spots, the witnesses who are beneficiaries of this racketeering, are the second largest party with influence over the rewards allocations.
Being that, as I am sure my analysis will bear out in the near future, at least one member of the founding group of steemit, inc, is the superstar of self voting (I dare someone to fish out every one of @dan's votes and prove me wrong), the hunch I have is that when I complete a comprehensive analysis of voting, witness voting, rewards payouts and transfers out to exchanger accounts, that I will discover that the amount of Steem being syphoned out by Steemit, Inc, and their gaggle of Witness Ghouls, will be far in excess of even triple the 'were we just paying the inflation out evenly) ratio, compared to stake, will be revealed.
This is more than just a bad game for newbies. This is a racket, where the founders and their collaborators, are stealing the money, via undue allocation of the rewards pool, which up until 3 months ago, was at a 50% dilution per annum, not just consuming the life and times of thousands of tiny accounts of people working hard to win a share of the rewards pool, but more importantly, of those who have ploughed in in some cases up to a million or more dollars of fiat currency or bitcoins.
I'm sure that I'm gonna get swatted at again, maybe a few choice adhoms, but I don't give a fuck anymore.
I'm looking forward to the spectacle that is going to be potentially the most epic case of a financial scam prosecution, in the history of the USA
Maybe I will even get some compensation, but I don't think so. I made plenty from my first 6 months dedicated work, and I believe that I can see a timeline for the future pathway of the steem price, over the next two months, and if my estimates are correct, my next profit, from my hard work and prescience, will be at least 4x what the last was.
And then I can finally move on, to build Dawn, to move to Siberia, to build my workshop, and the EM propulsion system and energy scavenger/magnetic battery that I have designed.
I have to agree with you that Steem Inc founding members and miners have too much control over both who witnesses are and where rewards go (including presumably back to themselves, though will wait for data on that claim). I believe this happened in HF 17/18 where Ned swooped in and changed his witness votes depending on who was adopting the HF.
While it's totally fine to use your votes however, this kind of concentration of power makes the idea that Steem as a DAO a farce. @demotruk maybe you were right about the idea that voting can be corruption, at least at the highest level of stakeholding.
Interesting view. Do you think that the Steem price will move to zero over the next 2 months? If so, what's your mechanism for betting against it?
Not against bitcoin, but bitcoin against the dollar, not zero, but maybe even as low as $1000 or even $800. This will directly impact steem if its exchange rate does not accelerate against BTC, it will mean we fall as BTC falls. But that doesn't matter.
Even if I finish my task of assembling a giant collection of blockchain analysis, and clearly name and quantify the amount of intentional manipulation going on, look at how long it has taken for the air to fall out of the ICO racket-markets, of which barely 2, maybe, will ever amount to anything.
2-3 months is about typical for the latency of financial systems adjusting to the facts of the marketplace, mainly because the central banks put on such a spectacle, and use the government guns to suppress the information.
People will run to steem if btc plummets, giving you the acceleration upwards I mentioned, and then once the dust settles on segwit, we ride its recovery upwards as well. I may even be underestimating how high it will go before the market figures out, in a part thanks to my investigation and deduction work, that the company behind this, and the mechanisms they baked in, are designed to milk the very investors who will push the price up so high.
Hopefully I am correct in my estimation of the timeline on this, because it will be very convenient for me, in my future plans. I need at least $50k worth of industrial grade inorganic chemistry equipment to manufacture diamagnetic materials, robust resonator chambers, and hundreds of miles of high quality electromagnet windings, rare earth magnets, and probably I will also need something to build quite high strength, non-ferrous frameworks (possibly titanium).
My estimate is not based on what I want, however, but simply, the typical peak to trough ratios well known as fibonacci retracements. The next, and maybe last, peak, of the Steem price has to be at least double the previous at $4.31. Thus $8 is my guess. But it can hit other ratios above this level, thtat are progressively smaller by a fibonacci reverse sequence (the next two price levels above it would be 5 more, and then 3 more, and then 2 and then 1. Thus, all else being equal, the maximum potential for spiking is about 19.
This number 19 is coming up way too often. Did you know that in the Qur'an the number of angels who preside over hell is 19?
Thanks for the info, and good luck with your general plans. Although I rather hope you're mistaken regarding the intentions behind, and the fate of Steem and other cryptocurrencies.
Cryptocurrencies, in my opinion, is the project initated by the NSA to prepare the ground for a centralised, single global electronic currency, which has permissions that enable the 'Authorities' to revoke your access to your funds, if you should happen to say something they don't like.
However, I believe that Satoshi was not employed by the NSA, but rather a rogue, who devised a system that solved most of the flaws in the NSA's flawed models, which by the way also inspired the recent anonymising ZKP based protocols (there is an ancient paper by the NSA dating back to the late 90s that lays it all out, in a rough, and totally preliminary architecture design).
Thus, it is my view that in fact what has been going on with Steem, is an attempt to discredit open blockchains, in favour of controlled, corporate/government blockchains. Notice how every other country is announcing blockchain systems for all kinds of things.
This is just a warmup. Steem embodies the core concepts, in a muddled, and corrupt form, of what the 100% anarchic free blockchain will look like. I am working on what I think it should be, once I'm done with playing the Adversary against the corruption I am certain exists. And possibly even, connections to Intelligence organisations.
I've considered this kind of thing myself, but in nothing like such depth. It does seem unlikely that open blockchains would have been allowed to flourish unless they were 'under control'. I'd be interested in any links you have to help confirm or refute your hypothesis, and if you write a book/paper at some stage, I'd like to read it.
Are you anonymous, or do you have a public web presence?
You can chat with me on Telegram at https://t.me/steempunk and I am about to switch to Busy.org, as I also caught out eSteem in 'minor' mischief, and chainbb also in more major, but not so mischievous mischief.
I was working on Dawn, precisely because of these suspicions, which my post-alcoholic brain-in-transition has driven me to such intensive thinking, has now got even more, substantial evidence in the form of game mechanics 'bugs' that allow this exploitation. See my recent post about the number 19 and Dan Larimer, for some somewhat crazy coincidences and semiotics, and my post about eSteem also lays out a rough sketch of the game mechanics 'flaws' and how they play out.
Dawn will not be a controllable blockchain. Whether I decide to implement it or not, really depends on opportunity and resources. I have @faddat back from the near self destruction of his life in Cambodia, who is now starting the path of eliminating the causes of his neurological/psychiatric problems, and I have good reason to believe he may a powerful future ally, when he has made progress to recovering his health.
I can't specifically point to any pro or con citations about this, I just remember one of the steem-coop guys, who is a mathematician, and deeply interested in game theory, started talking about multi-party prisoner's dilemmas. The cogs ticked over and the conclusions started to arise.
So, first port of call for you will be in looking into multi-party prisoners' dilemmas. Then look at how the witness game, the blockchain itself in its infancy, and the growing problem in the 'community' of more and more exploitative, malicious and vicious players.
Not only that, I suspect that specific accounts at steemit.chat had a hit put on them using a hacker-for-hire, and after being 'smacked down' in a particular issue report I made at the steemit github, which mind you, Issue does not mean bug in the simple sense but can also mean logic errors that lead to exploits - I have also been blocked from posting more.
After thinking even further through, I am glad now that I took down my witness, because it would have allowed the breach of my l0k1 account, if they could breach steemd, and then, the docker between them and the file containing the sensitive data.
I had a dream this morning, that someone had their fingers in my wallet and were trying to scoop coins out of it. Then it changed into my leather key-wallet. Pretty big warning, I think. Note that I had effectively restrained them, in the dream, and the last thoughts before awakening were that I had to shut these robbers down for good (the dream ones). Same as the ones outside the dream.
This is very interesting. My father who passed away talked about this and I always thought he was the only one who thought this way and was possibly losing his mind. Always keep a little gold on hand.
We are far from the situation where there is a compulsory, Legal Tender blockchain currency. I doubt even if they do pass such laws that it will stop the 'black market' in crypto money. All the ways to try and stop it are able to be bypassed. It's much too easy to make the traffic look like 'legal' traffic types, if you have to conceal it. Blockchain chatter is literally called 'gossip' by the way :)
I believe peer-review is a fine interpretation, but it's also an indirect, emergent property of the protocol, not the direct intent.
Does this mean you advocate some kind of on-chain policing of self-votes?
It is the intent, this is clear from the whitepaper. No it's not direct as such, as emergent properties can be planned. Look at any complex system simulation of ants for an example.
I don't know what kind of on chain policing there could be, but I would oppose anything that is not a general rule. Maybe something like @edje 's idea of a committee would be like that. It's not something that I think would work, better to realign the rules to encourage the emergent positivity and mutual benefit.
I'm not sure if you read @rycharde 's post here but I think point 13 is a really interesting idea to reduce the effectiveness of self voting and so-called "circle jerk" behavior, via incentives as opposed to policing.
As a member of the Steem Coop and Project Smackdown, I agree with a lot of what you're saying here. Us members have slightly different perspectives and ways of expressing our concerns.
I often disagree with the exact terms elfspice uses, but we usually end up agreeing in the end. The problem as I see it is mostly psychological and secondly economical.
1 The user upvoting himself a lot, will often for good reasons make himself look like a douche taking large sums in reward without considering differing opinions. If he gets away with it, that makes the entire system look weak/deceptive.
2 A large stake holder voting for himself is spending a large amount of his votes on himself rather than curating more broadly. This means that he is propelling himself higher in the ecosystem. When this is done in mass, the same starts to apply to the whole system.
I don't see any and all selfvoting as bad either. But it depends on the reasons behind it, which we will have a hard time knowing unless we ourselves are the person upvoting.
You say
and I agree that it's about using your stake as you please, which is what we're currently doing with the bot. However creating a social media platform that will reach wide acceptance is about creating a system that will promote community, which is in fact a matter of reviewing peers.
I don't for one second think that removing the selfvote will bring neither Steem the social network to a halt, nor Steem the 'organically' growing and selfadjusting blockchain which could be used for a number of other things. However the selfvotes themselves work against decentralization and gives bad publicity, especially because of the psychological incentive difference between giving yourself 1 cent versus giving yourself 50 dollars.
As Dan has said, voting both directions and for whoever you want is allowed by the system and expected to be. In this project we're working with the same constraints. We're using our stake and voting the way we want to vote.
In the future, what I personally want to do is get away from bots as much as possible. The bot is merely a way to influence the general outlook of Steem users and to make selfvoting less popular. Ideal would be to make a carefully thought through hardfork change down the road.
The problem with the above argument is that we all know not all good posts ever make neither the user posting nor the user curating that much money. And even if they did, the average social media users would get left way behind the selfupvoting larger stakeholder. The system doesn't selfcorrect quite as well in this sense as many users would like to believe, even if it also isn't as bad as others think.
Yep, I agree, totally. I just wonder if it passes the self-consistent test?
I think I can agree with this as well.
The self-consistency-test seems flawed to me.
Each party is, from a technical point of view, entitled to using the blockchain or any part thereof and for purposes he wants to only insofar as the blockchain itself - the total network output, from all it's active users with varying degrees of power - allows this.
That doesn't mean that any mechanism or action recorded on it is the most ethical one or that we all have to approve all actions taking place within the network. In fact the system was built so that users could disagree within it and also actively petition to change it, precisely because there was an understanding that individuals had to make the moral decissions and that the economics of the individuals making them would have to drive the developement of the network.
The blockchain itself is not private property of any one person, but merely influenced by many members of the social network surrounding it. This should be understood by all participators. So in order to work against the parts we disagree with, we use all means at our disposal that don't include physically harming the property of others while attempting to explain our reasoning.
I just want to add one thing, that is also relevant as you mentioned @dantheman's posts about the use of downvotes. The downvote, and the flag need to be separable. It should be possible to disagree on post rewards, but not on the overall reputation of the egregious self-assignment of rewards. It should be possible to flag, and not affect rewards, if your primary goal is to send the message that the content is not just bad, but invective, inflammatory.
I believe that having a high reputation, but low SP, diminishes the effect of a downvote or upvote on the reputation of the target account. I don't know the full details of the mechanism, but I am pretty sure there needs to be an option to balance rep effect and reward diminish effect. Oh yes, for one very simple and obvious reason:
Let's say you have some spammy post that you want to flag, and you have enough rep and SP to push their whole account under zero. But they only have SP of, say, 2500, you will thereby consume all of the vote power required for this smackdown to give the reputation effect, but it only needed 2500SP of 100% voting power to erase the reward.
Or in other words, if you can alter the two parameters, two sliders, you can conserve your vote power, while inflicting a full reputation hit.
Or vice versa, to upvote with only a small reward, but a big boost in rep.
Note that 'disagreeing on post rewards' was not always listed in the flag interface, yet you cannot avoid affecting them when you use it.
@banjo what do you think about self voting?
I don't know hannah.
Nice post! Lots of logical fallacies concerning self voting.
For me, it's basically like @master-set is saying:
In my ideal Steemit world, upvotes go to good quality content. In our current Steemit world, this is far from the case and it is basically just about who you know (or better yet: who knows you) and how rich you are in your Steem Power.
I wrote about it yesterday. I feel the older minnows are being left out in the cold in favor of upvoting newbies for being now. This frustrates me, because I see the amount of upvotes declining. This has led me to upvote some of my own, longer comments, to make sure I atleast earn just a little bit still. I don't particularly like it, but Steemit isn't fair anyway, so sometimes I just can't care too much anymore...
I read your post, very candid take on things.
My own opinion is that outgoing votes (i.e. for others) are going down as self votes increase. I need to make sure the data supports this but it seems to be what's happening.
That could very well be possible. Thinking about this, I auto upvote my post when publishing. This automatically happens at 100%, while I have adjusted my votes on other people's posts, to make sure I can upvote as many as I did before.
The ability to self-vote is a powerful incentive to buy and stake STEEM. I rarely hear this mentioned. Where do people think the token gets its value from?
Totally agree. If yoi couldnt self vote then the platform will lose interest as it takes people a long time to get stabalized on Steem. In my view its a posative
The genius thing about it is that if you want to influence the direction of the platform, you can buy a bigger stake than the people whose behavior you find offensive. They've basically figured out how to financially incentivize being pissed off on the internet.