RE: Steemit Update: HF21 Testnet, SPS, EIP, Rewards API, SMTs!
EiP is threatening the bottom-line for traditional bid-bots owners & co FYI.
1.) Rewards will be reduced in general.
2.) A higher percentage of rewards will be dependant on how good the post is behaving; or whether it's being downvoted (big risk due to the downvote-pool).
Everybody can think what they want about myself and Smartsteem.com, but at this point in time, my actions and decisions are completely in line for the good of Steem. Otherwise, why am I still holding hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Steem?
I want this blockchain to succeed and its currencies to become more valuable! If this reduces the rewards people generate who aren't staked in the system at first, maybe that's a good thing, don't you think? Otherwise, Steem is just a place where free-loaders can get some STEEM & SBD posting content without risk, while stakeholders are the ones taking the beating since they're locked in at the same time as other cryptocurrencies have a bull-run.
EiP will take steps in the direction of people wanting to be a hodlers of Steem and I'd say that's a very good thing for us.
That's what Steem originally was. That's what it is now. And bid bots make it possible for staked and non-staked users alike to increase their risk-free liquid rewards. We don't need bid bots and their owners to "protect" any investments/investors here. In fact, they are one of the largest contributors of negative value to the platform, thanks to the largest contributors: STINC and our past top-20 witnesses that approved the delegation, linear rewards curve, and 10-vote daily target protocols, which paved the way for the anti-social and cannibalistic economic behavior we see today.
None of these actually matter much, they just shift around the methods that milkers will use but with automation, vote selling, reward-sharing schemes, etc. this was always going to turn out badly.
The only rule set remotely likely the voted content rewarding model that we have (as opposed to other completely different models like paid boosting) that has a shadow of a chance to work has significantly higher curation and cheaper/free downvotes.
Well, that's my point. It turned out badly because those protocol changes made it much easier and much more lucrative for the "milkers."
Delegation made it possible for non-invested users to rent stake and run vote-selling bots practically risk- and accountability-free. It also allowed entities like STINC and users like Freedom/Pumpkin to gift or rent out their previously and mostly unused influence, further diluting all other stakeholder influence. I think you're aware of how that distorts and influences markets and development in a variety of ways.
(I say "risk-free" because promising liquid payments for renting SP is a stakeholder's dream. You can keep your stake powered up and still cash out the rewards earned from it...with no actual "contributing" effort to the blockchain/content required. It's essentially a circumvention of DPoS.)
Linear rewards made it possible to precisely calculate vote values and offer them for sale at a "fair market value." It also makes "guaranteed ROI" possible - which further allows for easy automation.
The 10-vote target made that delegated voting power and vote value 4x more valuable for "promoting" content. It allows bid bots to push the poor content to the top and mostly out-compete "organic" curation.
So I do think these protocols matter...a lot. Yes, we had other issues of buying/selling votes before, but not nearly at this current scale and with this much visibility. This bold move of "bringing it out of the shadows" has been a disaster. Not only is it horrible for perception, but it doesn't accurately depict the type or the amount of backroom trading that may have taken place previously - and that we were unaware of - which was likely relatively minimal.
Instead of cleaning things up via transparency, it made things actually appear exponentially filthier.
Instead of giving more influence to less-invested users, it apparently has made those users see the game as even more rigged.
Instead of attracting, retaining, and cultivating more active users, we simply have more former users going off and creating their own chains, using other chains instead, and/or spreading the word about how awful Steem has become. And we thought users didn't like Steem before the 2017 hard forks. Even the people still here can barely stand the place.
I get what you're saying, but if we really want to fix the economic protocols/incentives, we can't continue ignoring the protocol changes that completely broke the system and what little social atmosphere we had prior to those changes.
Also - this is a perfect example of why multiple large code changes shouldn't be made in one fork. And a great example of why we should be able to evaluate new behavior and revert back to previous protocols when things break or don't work as planned.
This could already be done and was already being done with vote bots where users signed up with their posting authority. Delegating your SP to a vote bot (in exchange for pay) and giving a vote bot the ability to vote with your own account (in exchange for pay) are essentially identical. It was already happening on a moderate scale prior to delegation and what changed things (including the scale) between then and now was not so much delegation, but the passage of three years of time with more and more people recognizing value of taking maximum advantage of the incentives offered, and then doing so. That was and is inevitable given broken incentives with or without delegation.
Delegation was never at the core of the problem, though it may have contributed in a small way.
But realistically if we want to improve things now (years late I think we will both agree), we need not relitagate the mistakes of the past, however we might personally rank their severity.
What will incentivize people to power up steem from these changes?
Higher curation rewards, which means you'll earn more money with your stake by voting than before.
Since SPS is being introduced as well, and the inflation is being shifted partly from the reward-pool (author & curation) to the SPS, it might look like the curation rewards haven't changed or have become less. But they are indeed bigger and the SPS is supposed to be a net positive for the Steem ecosystem, which hopefully includes an increased STEEM valuation over time.
The shift from author to curator is numerically much larger than the shift from author+curator to SPS. Curators will see an immediate and obvious net increase, not quite double but close to it.
What exactly will there be left to power up?
If you're referring to author-rewards; you will still earn much more than on any other platform. Besides that, you can also power up Steem which you've bought or earned in another way (Steem Monsters, etc.)
Hmm, no. STEEM is failing to onboard top content creators from add revenue sharing platforms, and the EIP will only make this worse. It is failing to onboard many good fiction authors and convince them to go STEEM first with their fiction at the expense of sales on Amazon KDP, Play Books and Apple iBooks.
This I feel is the bigest mistake Steemit keeps making, forgetting it is a content platform that needs to actually compete for top content creators with the likes of Google, Amazon and Apple.
I don't think we need more onboarding. We can't even keep those who are onboarded active. Activity is needed.
Figure out how to have active users rather than mere account holders.
Downvotes will be bought and sold on the open market for a big discount.
This is all just narative. Simulate it with some old data and see how the incentives pan out. The only real incentives the EIP creates favor the bid bot economy. It could be easily fixed I feel by making down votes hit curation harder than the author.
That sort of simulation is entirely worthless because it doesn't account for changing behavior, which is the entire point of it.
Downvotes absolutely should hit the author (as well as the other curators, but not to the extent of favoring the author). The fundamental goal of both upvotes and downvotes is to pay authors in accordance with a stake-weighted consensus of value contributed. Downvoters are contributing their opinion into that consensus process that the payout to the author is too high.
That method shows us exactly what behaviour will be first to be incentified to be changed, and you can start reasoning from that. People don't change behaviour because of eloquent narrative about incentives meant to change their behaviour, they change behaviour because of actual stimuli acting on their existing behaviour.
That same method could have warned us about the disaster that was HF20. I feel it quite worrying, especially after our HF20 that anyone still could consider real-data simulations "useless". They aren't just usefull, they are essential to preventing what is perfectly predictable.
At best it is of minimal value in these situations.
Take downvotes for example. A number I saw recently was 0.008% of votes being downvotes, essentially zero. Running a simulation over that data will tell you nothing about downvotes because (for practical purposes) no one uses them. Only after the cost structure attached to downvotes changes will, possibly, the usage of downvotes change, and nothing in the historical data will tell us how it will change or how much.
HF20 is a very different type of situation. Very little of HF20 was intended to or could reasonably be expected to change behavior via incentives on a widespread scale. What it did do is block certain actions (spamming mostly) which meant that it wouldn't even be possible to simulate in that way, because many of the previous recorded actions in the history would be blocked, resulting in a chain state from that point forward deviating from the historical state. Many subsequent actions in history would then become invalid, leading to further rejections and deviation.
One must use the right sorts of tools in any situation. Historical replay as you suggest is the right tool for some problems and the wrong one for others.