RE: Witness Consensus: @therealwolf
The curation reward ratio doesn't give an incentive to self vote. Self voting is inherently desirable and incentivized regardless of the ratio, regardless of the reward curve. Curation will always be less incentivized than self voting unless votes are countered in some way or curation is 100% (0% author rewards), because you can't go higher than financially extracting 100% of your voting influence.
The reward curve at superlinear only changes who has the ability to farm their votes, it transfers that power from small voters to large voters. People like to pretend that self voting and vote selling wasn't happening before the reward curve change, it was actually worse than today but happening among a smaller group who didn't have to open it up to the market. Randowhale was also launched before linear reward curve.
There is only one thing that will make vote farming go away, and that's accountability. Increasing downvotes will make it easier, but ultimately the largest stakeholders need to have the mindset to engage in applying accountability to selfish voters. I know around here we like to think if we just tweak the incentives everything will change, but contrary to popular belief humans are not completely driven by incentives (see extrinsic vs intrinsic motivation), and tweaking incentives only goes so far. You can have two groups of people with the exact same system of incentives, yet resulting in different outcomes based on the attitudes of the people involved (see Bob Altemeyers psychological experiments where people play a political game. The game rules never change, but based on the selection of personality types for participants, you get radically different outcomes).
We don't have the option of changing the personality types involved, or even having any influence on it whatsoever. People come and go as they please.
We do have the option of changing the economic incentives and in fact you can run the same experiment as above in reverse: Keep the personality types (or individuals) the same and change the economic incentives. You will get most certainly different outcomes. (Of course this broad class of experiment has been run a huge number of times in both controlled psych research settings as well as many other systems.)
I don't think anyone ever claimed this. That is not the same thing as saying that incentives don't influence behavior. They certainly do.
The individuals who have the largest stakes can change their policy on how they use that stake. That's not an option for me (I can only choose how I apply mine) but it is an option for them.
When people argue that we don't have a problem with culture, that is essentially what they are saying, that only incentives are a way for behaviour of participants in the system to change.
I'm going to say it again. We don't have a knob we can turn to change the culture. By contrast, we can adjust the code. Perhaps that influences culture but such uncertain influence is the best we can do. Culture is a dependent variable not an independent one.
If my vote is worth 5$ via self-voting, but I can get out 8$ with curation by voting on the right content, then curation has a bigger incentive. And people usually follow what is worth more.
What is selfish? Using the own stake to get the most out of it? I mean, most humans on earth live to work, what is so wrong with trying to get out of this loop by making money with Steem?
What I want is for people to be rewarded for holding Steempower, while doing the right thing. This means: voting for good content, contribution instead of an endless loop of shitposts.
You can't reliably get $8 from curation. The reliable amount you'd get is going to be about 50% of the value of your vote, less than a self vote.
Selfish in this context is people who are aiming to maximize the amount of stake they get from the system as opposed to acting in a way to build the network and make it more valuable as a whole. Essentially farming your votes.
Sure you can. You just gotta vote on the right posts.
https://steemworld.org/@aicurator
So you're saying that when somebody has let's say 50 Steempower that person should rather work on increasing the value of Steem instead of trying to get more Steem?
That person would have the same ROI when STEEM goes from 1$ to 10$ as if he'd go from 50 Steempower to 500 Steempower. Only that the latter is much easier to accomplish aka. it's actually something the person can influence.
Then not everyone can do it. The best curators have to take curation rewards from other voters to achieve high returns. There's half as much money in total available for curation vs. for self voting, so it can only be used to motivate a very few. It's completely untenable that curation be overall more rewarding in general than self voting unless there is also major vote policing going on as well. In other words the only way to make self voting less attractive than curation is to bring down the returns on self voting, not increase curation.
Yes, I think if we were doing that collectively it would be extremely powerful and have much better returns than vote farming. We'd be turning Steem from a niche tech thing that a few people can milk for some extra money*, into something valuable for the world.
The way you calculate ROI here is a bit confused. Going from 50 SP to 500SP is not a return on investment. You don't put in 50 SP as an investment and get out 500SP, even 100% self voting unless you're talking many years. This actually kind of proves my point, the only way you get 10* and better returns is by the value of the coin going up.
You're right that it's hard for a small stakeholder to influence the price positively, though it could be easier to influence it negatively. By vote farming you make vote farming seem acceptable to those around you. It's easy to lower the standard of social acceptability and undermine norms, everyone has some power to influence that. Ultimately it's the larger stakeholders with the power to create and enforce norms in our system, so I don't expect it to happen from the bottom up.
* Note: the people who have been milking Steem in the last 10 months have most likely lost money if they bought early in the year. Even self voters are likely largely down.