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RE: SMT Voting Mana Deep Dive

in #smt5 years ago

Great explanation and important changes. Though I still have a question: if I change my 100% vote to 50%, I'm not being charged additional mana, but the curation rewards are reset, right? It might be a good side benefit if the curation rewards wouldn't be reset afterwards. Or isn't this possible due to the vote being replaced, including timestamp?

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There really should be some sort of penalty. If you vote 100% and then I downvote because I think that is excessive, and then you reduce your vote to 50%, I've still used up my downvote mana. Similarly, you might make a big vote giving someting visibility and other smaller voters might follow on expecting the post to trend, generating curation rewards. Then when you remove/reduce your vote, the chance of trending is reduced and the later voters may regret their votes (despite potentially gaining relative curation reward share).

I think the inherently sequential nature of voting is pretty important and there needs to be sufficient penalties while allowing people to change votes when actually necessary. An exception could be if there are no subsequent votes (you are still the last vote), perhaps it should be possible to change vote without any sort of penalty (a misclick exception). But that will be an edge case and even very unlikely to ever happen if the user base is large enough with many votes coming in all the time.

I was thinking that the rule I had in mind for changing to a later vote position (equivalent to unvoting and revoting with a different account) is enough of a penalty, though now that I think about it a bit, there are plenty of situations where this isn't true, especially with auction timer and large vote weight changes. But when it comes to the votes before such an adjustment, I don't see the conceptual difference between an event in which you change your vote significantly and an equivalent vote by another account that comes to shake things up.

I think complete negation of curation is too harsh of a penalty, especially in cases where one makes mistakes, which you mentioned.

I was also thinking in terms of comparisons to a multi account setup, though they are a bit hard to compare exactly. Multi account setups with the same total stake can adjust the post payout multiple times without sacrificing any curation, for example.

The point about multiple accounts is an excellent one. But with multiple accounts you can't remove the first vote at all, only add to it or subtract from it with a downvote. Not exactly the same thing as changing.

Though if one can argue that the multiaccount solution is strictly better than changing, that is an argument for allowing changing, but not to the extent that it may convey further advantage or disadvantage others. Some aspects of this may be very difficult to realize in implementation.

But when it comes to the votes before such an adjustment, I don't see the conceptual difference between an event in which you change your vote significantly and an equivalent vote by another account

I believe you are talking about votes which are sequentially previous? In that case I agree, which is why I said that when your vote is last, changing it can be allowed without penalty.

But...on second thought even, that is not entirely true. Your vote might have discouraged others from following and then once you remove your vote the auction timer would be burned down. I believe the rule about allowing the last vote to change with no penalty can only strictly be applied after the penalty expires (so that mere passage of time does itself not change the state of voting).

especially in cases where one makes mistakes, which you mentioned

Another rule variant I've considered aside from being the last vote as I mentioned is to allow vote changes without penalty or with reduced penalty for some time period, say one minute, even if no longer last in the stack. Subsequent voters can consider that previous votes are not yet 'final' until the timer has expired.

But with multiple accounts you can't remove the first vote at all, only add to it or subtract from it with a downvote.

You can remove the first vote at the cost of curation just like the single case, but with the proposed change, the single account will get a sort of benefit by only being charged the delta for an upward adjustment. Hmm.

I believe you are talking about votes which are sequentially previous?

Yes, but I mean distinguishing between
a) account changing vote, say reduction by X rshares
b) different account coming in and downvoting the same amount of rshares

To anyone that has voted before this event, it looks the same.


Under the "set curation weight to last vote" proposal, we could still apply an adjustment penalty on top, for example. And make it so that the curation weight cannot be larger than what it was * penalty. Something like that. Maybe that's too complicated, but probably not much more than curation is already :)

the single account will get a sort of benefit by only being charged the delta for an upward adjustment

That's not a benefit relative to multiple accounts. With an original vote of A and a new vote of B, the voter is charged for A+B-A. But with two accounts, the first account would vote A and be charged for A, and the second account would vote B-A and be charged for B-A, for a total cost of again A+B-A.

Maybe that's too complicated

I think it is because I'm coming at it from the perspective that vote changing should not be normalized. There are just too many ways in which it complicates and undermines the sequential nature of voting (where voters act with knowledge of previous votes). IMO vote changing is useful in certain exceptional cases such as mistakes or new information about the content, but mostly people just just take more care in voting without expecting to be able to change it with no or low penalty.

I do agree with not incentivizing account splitting, which calls for penalties being small or zero to the extent they can be circumvented with multiple accounts (as above).

Yeah, I think you're right in that vote changing should not be a normal occurrence. Was just thinking if there is something in between the multi account (keeps CR) and single account change situation (no CR)

And yup I am not sure what I was thinking about in the multi-account scenario above, I was wrong on that point.

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I agree on the first point. The advantage that multiaccounting can incrementally increase votes without penalty but single accounts can't is not ideal.

If you vote 100% and then I downvote because I think that is excessive, and then you reduce your vote to 50%, I've still used up my downvote mana. Similarly, you might make a big vote giving someting visibility and other smaller voters might follow on expecting the post to trend, generating curation rewards. Then when you remove/reduce your vote, the chance of trending is reduced and the later voters may regret their votes (despite potentially gaining relative curation reward share).

Good point!

if I change my 100% vote to 50%, I'm not being charged additional mana, but the curation rewards are reset, right?

This is my understanding.

Trying to think of an example where not resetting CR could be tricky:

If you change the 50% vote to -50%, you consume mana of a 50% downvote.

Here, would you want/deserve to keep your curation reward?

If you change the 50% vote to -50%, you consume mana of a 50% downvote.

Here, would you want/deserve to keep your curation reward?

No. Only if weight > 0.

I think the problem of not resetting the curation rewards is how to calculate it, should it be calculated at the time of changing it to 50% or should it just make it half when the upvote changes from 100% to 50%.

We should be clear here, because to me "reset" means "as if you voted at the new time", but in reality, the current behavior is "give up curation altogether on the post". I would like to ask if we can do the "as if voted at new time" deal.

This makes the most sense to me as well.

the current behavior is "give up curation altogether on the post"

Ah really? I didn't know that. I thought it was give up your current position (timing) for the curation rewards and replace it with the new one, for the new vote.

What's the downside about keeping the curation ratio if the vote weight is changed from 100% to 50%? The voting mana isn't returned, so there's already the downside from that. But I don't think it needs to be treated as a completely new vote.

Example:

100% vote => 40% curation effectivity
a few hours later
50% vote => 15% curation effectivity

Currently, we would use the newest curation effectivity, but why not use the first one?

Not sure, have to think on it. Is there a difference down or up?

All I know is that treating as a new vote is better than complete removal. If this other suggestion has no weird quirks it could be fine too.

Posted using Partiko Android

It should only work if the vote weight is being reduced, otherwise, you could spam very small votes (0.01%) and adjust their vote weights once the curation effectiveness is known.

A good example of my initial point is:

Let's say I'm automatically curating a specific author, but a specific post isn't as valuable as I thought, so I want to reduce the weight.

  • If I'd do it now, I'll be charged additional voting mana and I forfeit my curation rewards (very bad).
  • With @vandebergs PR, I will not be charged additional voting mana and I will not forfeit the curation rewards, but it will be treated as an additional vote in terms of calculating the curation timeframe.
  • If we want the action of reducing the voting weight after a vote is being done to have the smooth feeling that it's just being adjusted instead of casting a new vote, the curation timestamp should also be preserved IMO.

I thought of that, but if your weight doesn't change in the up direction, the rshares that you piled on top don't have curation weights associated to it. Granted, it might still be better than voting 100% at the later time to begin with, but have to work out those numbers.

But if up vs down matters, I think treating as if you only voted late is the more consistent approach.

(Btw I don't think vandeberg proposed treating as new weight. It looks like it will just be forfeited altogether, unless I misread)

Posted using Partiko Android

(Btw I don't think vandeberg proposed treating as new weight. It looks like it will just be forfeited altogether, unless I misread)

Re-read the post and you're right. Well, that sucks. Is there a technical limitation for that? Even if the vote would be added on top, the code could look for the newest vote from voters.

As I noted elsewhere, I think penalties, even fairly harsh, for changing votes are reasonable given the inherently sequential nature of voting. Your vote may induce others to vote after you and then when you change your vote, their votes may be hurt.

Changing is needed in some edge cases like when a post is discovered as plagiarism after people already voted on it (actually even this is debatable since the early voters could and perhaps should have been more careful in vetting, and the solution is just pile on downvotes) but it shouldn't really be normalized to too large an extent.

Or isn't this possible due to the vote being replaced, including timestamp?

I think that's the explanation for curation rewards being reset. The order of voting changes.

But I believe these changes can be exploited: Vote a post with a high percentage, but if the pending payout doesn't reach the expected level, after a while change it to a much lower percent at no voting mana penalty.