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RE: Are You Seeing the Truth? What Is Your Vision of Steem?
The problem I've had with a lot of these proposals is NOT in trying them. I'm up for trying anything new, learning from it, and moving on if we need to.
However, proposing things like counter self-voting. That is super easy to get around just by using alternate accounts.
I've seen such proposals to these issues and others for a long time. They always seem to be something easy to circumvent once you consider people having more than one account.
It’s not countering self-voting or vote trading (which is the same thing by the way). I will still do it. Most will still do it. It’s just the frequency. At 100%, these actions currently bring 6-10x returns compared to curation (either post or account curation, including autovoting). The proposal seeks to bridge the gap so behaviours will land on a new equilibrium, one that with more curation happening.
Putting it simply, getting back ~50% of votes on average is more likely to get curation going and less self-voting / vote selling because it’s already part of the 50/50 act in each vote.
Of course, many may still exercise 100% of their votes back for themselves directly or indirectly, at least the gap is only at most 2x more than anyone engaging in curation.
Shrinking the gap to 2x max between curation vs selfvoting, I’d say it’s much more reasonable, and 2x more than makes up for the benefits of actually building a social network instead of being an anti-social user on the platform.
To amplify a bit what you said...the 2x gap is much, much smaller than currently. Curation currently yields around 15% (after factoring in the typical effect of the reverse auction), meaning the ratio between self-voting and curation is about 7x. Even if the effect of the reverse auction were diminished or removed, it would still be 4x. I agree with you that is too high and even 2x may still be too high. We might need to go to a higher curation percentage which would narrow the gap further (for example, 90% curation would reduce it to about 1.1x).
However, before we go that far we should certainly try moving way from 7x first. So I agree with the 50% part of the proposal.
I've written to @dwinblood below about this, not sure if it checks out. 2x may be justifiable. I think anything more than 50% is gonna have a hard time with the author-types. 90% is leaving almost nothing for them (although I could see that it encourages way more curation than authoring, and probably closer to the spread of user types in any social content platform)
edit: woops just realised this is the @dwinblood thread
Okay, "author types" are part of the community. Their opinion matters, but does that mean they have a veto?
I don't know if >50% is needed. But if it is needed to make the system work, what do we prefer? A system that doesn't work or pissing off the author types? I'll take the lesser evil if necessary,
Yes, I understand. I think your post was good and I'm willing to try it and pretty much anything. Keep what works well.
People can WHAT IF anything to death before trying it. So if people want to try new things I am certainly for it.
The average person would likely not think of alternative accounts. I don't know of many things that alternative accounts might not circumvent.
I also was talking about not being a fan of bidbots with someone a couple of days ago for many of the same reasons but I hadn't really deep dived into it at the level you did.
I self vote my post but I usually do only 1-2 posts per day. The rest I vote on other people. So I agree.
I also see and have seen these problems developing for a couple of years like you. I'd love to see it turned around. If it is not turned around I'll stick around until there is an alternative (perhaps EOS backed). Though I'll keep posting here as long as it remains functional.
I personally am not a fan of people down voting because they dislike the topic. I'd rather them ignore the post and go up vote stuff they like. It should balance out the same, and they are not restricting the interest of other people.
Downvoting is not really about disliking the topic.
I've suggested for a long time that we also have non-voting 'reactions' (like emoticons) where people can easily and concisely express an opinion (agree, disagree, etc.) separate from the reward-voting system. I understand this is part of the Steemit roadmap and is under development (I don't know at what stage).
Upvoting is really about thinking that rewarding the content brings value to Steem. It's a form of tipping where instead of tipping out of your own pocket, you get to tip out of a community pool. Downvoting is about thinking that it doesn't (or that the reward is excessive). Since the tips are being paid from a community pool, everyone gets a vote, and people need to keep each other honest by downvoting when necessary. If we don't like that, then we need to dispense with the community pool concept, people and people can tip with their own money (with no chance of being downvoted).
The two concepts are very distinct but both are necessary.
Yeah, you and I had this discussion a few times almost two years ago.
I've come to the conclusion that most of the disagreement comes from the clash between those who view voting as a shareholder would view it and those who view voting as a market.
The only minds we control are our own. So forcing our interpretation upon others as the correct way won't really ever work. There will always be contention. This is partially why I don't discuss it as much anymore as I don't really have a workable solution.
The reality it is both of those views slammed together and they may not be completely compatible. What you described DOES accurately define voting in a shareholder type of environment.
It does not describe a market.
I contend that the vast amount of people do not view using steem as a shareholder environment. Many of them may never have been on a board, been a shareholder or anything of that nature so that type of interaction is totally alien to their mind.
In a market there is no down vote. It is simply supply and demand. There is no anti-demand. I describe it like walking into a store. You go in and buy (vote) for what you want. You don't go in and say "I hate anchovies, they shouldn't be on the shelf". You ignore the anchovies and buy what you are interested in. That creates demand for your interest. Yet it does not cancel demand for other topics you are not interested in they are just much lower.
The problem with what is good for steem shareholder mentality is that it is that it enables people to pull stuff off of the shelves of the market because THEY subjectively don't think it adds value. It doesn't matter that others may think it is valuable. If power is sufficient since it is not a 1:1 voting situation it gives some the ability to be dictators and totally squash the interest of others. And that DOES happen on steem. That is not good for STEEM as far as I am concerned.
I no longer advocate for removing down voting and I haven't for a long time as it is the only way currently to combat spam, plagiarism, and abuse. Though abuse also becomes subjective.
I do believe adding the reward pool as a reason to down vote was a very bad idea. If people voted on demand then it will level itself out as it spread the actual interests across the pool. Will there be people gaming it if that were the case? Yes. Guess what? Many of the people claiming reward pool as justification for a down vote have been heavily gaming the system all along. That is going to happen.
"Code is law". No... code is what the programmer could determine how to implement. We know no solution to this at the moment that the code can fix. That doesn't mean we as a community cannot fix this. That is why it keeps coming up.
So the only thing I've been doing for awhile is trying to convince people not to down vote because they dislike someone, or disagree with what they are saying or talking about. That hurts steem. It may not hurt THEM but it hurts steem.
Thank you for the comments. I found them illuminating.
We do agree on this at least.
That is my biggest issue and always has been. I've seen people say they were doing it to protect the reward pool so they didn't appear to be doing it for dislike reasons then have watched them ignore or in cases up vote other content that if it were reward pool reasons they shouldn't have been up voting and potentially should have been down voting. This made me mostly view the reward pool excuse as a way to try to justify inconsistent application based upon even their own voting habits.
I've only been heavily down voted one time. That also came long after I'd mostly stopped talking about the subject. When I was talking about the subject it was always in defense of others. It was truly about trying to make steem a hospitable and inviting place.
I'd watch the conversations and see the toxic reactions people would have when their post was voted to almost nothing (sometimes was nothing) when it was not spam, it was not plagiarism, it was not abusive, and it happened to people when they were barely touching the reward pool.
Often they were pretty new. Then you can look at the people that get targeted clearly by bots designed to down vote everything they do by some powerful people and that doesn't send a positive perception about steem at all.
Do I have a solution? No.
Every solution I come up with in my head either introduces other problems, or I can easily see how to game.
That's part of the challenge of doing something no one has ever done before. It also introduces problems people haven't encountered before.
Thanks for the response. I haven't seen you write anything for awhile, but I suspect it is mainly because we are moving in different circles.