I propose we lower curation rewards to the point where the potential gain from curation is too small to make it worth the negatives associated with using an auto-vote bot
The issue here is that to a large stakeholder there are virtually no negatives to using an auto-vote bot. It's completely free, takes all of a couple minutes to set up, and you sit back and collect the rewards. So if the curation rewards are anything at all, it will still be worthwhile to use auto-vote bots. So, primarily for this reason, I don't think reducing curation rewards will have the intended effect and wouldn't support that change.
Another option I have been thinking about (which is more work) is to allow people to opt out of the voting game and just earn a straight return on their HP. So we divert a portion of the current reward pool to this new HP staking reward fund or whatever it's called, and people can opt into that if they want, and if they do then they cannot use their stake to vote on content.
The returns from this would depend on how much HP opts in to receive the straight staking rewards, since it would be splitting up a finite reward pool between all of the stake opted in. On the other end, users who choose to keep their HP voting will see their vote values per HP increase significantly due to a large amount of HP no longer participating in the voting/reward pool. So users will arbitrage both sides until the system hopefully comes to an equilibrium.
Basically, the system allows the HP holders to collectively determine the best APR on staked HIVE vs vote value in a free market type system.
At the end of the day, I think all this boils down to whether people think auto-voting is good, bad or neutral. From comments so far, seems like not many people mind it, and some like that it encourages staking versus holding liquid Hive. I don't really like auto-voting, but there's certainly other issues I'm more interested in dealing with, so I think I'm just going to table this proposal, since it seems to fall into the category where fear of the unknown outweighs the view that there's potential for improvement.
I would really like to look into how we can make things fairer for the small vote counts. If I am correct, vote counts under $5.00 are penalized in that the amount rewarded is less than the theoretical value of the upvote given, and that the opposite occurs on vote counts above that threshold.
In my view, upvoting comments is at least half of what a social media should do.
I notice a clear lack of upvoting on comments, and I think it is attributable to the fact that you get less reward than you would if you just looked for something crossing the $5.00 mark, regardless of whether it's good or not. (As people know, I vote comments anyway, because I think they are extremely important - engagement is one of the keys to success and it needs to be rewarded - all the well knowing that I'm actually hurting my ROI.)
Comments would also be more difficult to create curation trails for, I would think, if not impossible, thus dealing effectively with part of the issue.
If we were to go one step further and reverse the reward growth as the count grows on the larger vote counts, that would also further thwart the curation trails, again, I would think.
The long and the short of this would be not the elimination of curations trails, but a reduction in their profitability - meaning that they would still be an option for those who don't have the time. However, those who do have the time would have much more incentive to manually curate.
I think offering an opt-out staking option would completely defeat what HIVE is meant to be. Everybody would opt-out (except for a handful of diehards) and we'd be just one more staking cryptocurrency among hundreds.
For more than one reason, the most important being to foster community, but in this case to combat autovoting, I think the best way to address the issue is a dual approach that makes the small vote counts fairer while throttling down the rewards of the larger vote counts at the same time.
To be honest nobody is giving meaningful upvotes for comments anymore and in turn few people comment in comparison to the " good old days" which is very sad for the evolution of a social platform
I do but to be honest, I hate social media. #HIVE is more than any other pile of crap #mssm Mainstream Social Media to me and always will be. I like not being censored, hacked, spammed, targeted by bots, flooded with advertisements or having my content disappear/ be deleted. Most users of mainstream social media don't seem to care about any of those things...
I find it hard to "engage" digitally with users here as much as I once did on STEEM for many reasons, but those reasons don't relate to upvotes, HIVE income or curating rewards. My lack of engagement is my problem and something I'm still trying to change my online routines around.... But to see an immutable blockchain platform try to gear itself towards capturing market share away from Squitter, FuckBook, PooTube, DikDok is such a limiting way of looking at it all.
I know for a lot of #hive users, this is really important stuff. Growth in their 'investment' can be the priority reason for them bothering to post or upvote anything here and they want to see more and more users migrate here (or at least integrate #hive into their daily social media addictions). I just don't see it the same way.
The value is in the content on here, the drawcard is the technical superiority of the hive blockchain tech itself and the tenacity to commit to engagement here is what I see the major struggle as.
I appreciate very much what you are doing for HIVE @blocktrades. Regarding the topic of this post, I understand perfectly the inflation and reducing it can be a good thing if done well.
However I am worried about the incentives of Holding HIVE and powering up, some solution like the one described by @yabapmatt seems better for me.
A lot of blockchains are marketing the STAKING REWARDS better than us.
A system for staking and receiving rewards (higher than what we receive now for powering up), could work for people who do not want to vote 10 times a day.
Yes, it's just more work, and I think its not much different, except it encourages staking just to receive rewards. Some people think that is a good thing, some don't. I'm not a huge fan of staking just as a gimmic to create scarcity, but I do think it does have usefulness for governance, as it tends to ensure governance is managed by long term versus short term thinking.
Isn't it ironic how 'staking' aka vesting was a fresh, new concept on STEEM and HIVE all those years ago and now it's absolutely everywhere in the crypto world.
Well the thing is you, and I've heard plenty others say it's "bad", but I never really hear why it's so bad. I honestly think it's a positive. The reality is as you said, curation is hugely time consuming, and there's a ton of stake that wants to participate, but doesn't have the time to manually curate. What is the actual material damage of this that you see?
I think things like curation trails saved Steem from dying for a long time, and I feel like it's still a similar situation here.
I think what we need most desperately right now is still more users and I don't think this will move us closer to that. I think it would have the opposite effect.
We're not talking about curation trails. Those are arguably still manually curated, because someone is reading the posts before voting, hopefully.
The "bad" auto-voters are the ones that just vote around 5 minutes on posts by a specific set of authors that are expected to generate content that won't get downvoted. It's bad because no one is judging the contents of the article in that case. Right now, variations of this type of bot are probably the most economically rewarding.
I think this amounts to the same thing economically as the proposal, but maybe it appears better on paper, because people don't perceive the inflation loss. I guess one difference is that the method you're suggesting still incentivizes staking versus just holding, if that's an objective. And you can "tweak" things more if you have a variable percentage, rather than just an outright reduction in inflation.
Allocate the inflation to the bank accounts. Give people ROI on the bank accounts. On top of this, Use the bank accounts for collateral in DeFi loans for creating HBD. Curation can be eliminated entirely it makes zero sense. People who want ROI will move to the bank accounts and everyone else that wants social media Hive Fives will stick with the reward pool.
We hope people listen to you!
The inflation to bank accounts is what matt is proposing, I think. It's been discussed as an option for a while.
The big question is whether a smaller reward for saving versus a higher reward for the near "zero cost" activity of allocating it to an auto-vote bot. Now this could make economic sense if downvoting or early voting started bringing the two options into balance for people who curate via an auto-vote bot.
Agree with this suggestion. Reduce inflation and divide inflations rewards as u suggest.
I've quite similar impression @yabapmatt
I found it hard to imagine how reducing curation rewards would stop all those users who are using auto-upvote bots from using them.
I'm also afraid, that many stakeholders will not only see value of received tokens dropping, but also APR dropping. Which may prompt them to exit their investments in HIVE tokens.
Wouldn't you think, that perhaps removing non-linear reward curve would reduce auto-upvotes in current form?
Yours, Piotr