I'm not saying I'm completely opposed to "voting stake based slight superlinearity" as a step beyond the existing "temporal superlinearity" for curation rewards that I mentioned above, but I'd rather try smaller steps first, especially as I'm not certain that the existing superlinearity isn't sufficient. One annoyance for me is that I'm not even sure what the curve looks like for the temporal superlinearity, so it's hard to guess its impact.
50% curation rewards + a change to put downvoting on an even footing with upvoting seems like a simple first try, although I'm not really a big fan of downvoting as I think it has emotional effects beyond the simple math itself.
Also, once any change is made, I think it will take a month or two for people to modify their behavior to the new economics. At this point, I doubt most users have even optimized their voting for HF20 effects yet.
But despite that, I would certainly be happy to move now to a new version of the blockchain rules that supported some of these changes (50% curation being the one that seems "safest" to me).
I think I've read all of your replies here. I share some of your concerns but not all of your conclusions
Firstly I want to clearly spell out the problem: Under our current economy of linear and 25% curation, it is roughly 4x more financially rewarding to participate in content indifferent voting behavior than content reflective voting behavior. This has lead to a complete failure in our ability to function as a content discovery and rewards platform.
The solution therefore is as follows: We need to introduce a new economic scheme that incentivizes content reflective voting by rewarding it at least as much as content indifferent voting.
Higher curation seems like it'll at least be part of the solution. Note that curation % is sort of a soft parameter because the market itself can in many ways circumvent it and set their own curation %. For example, you can view bid bots as offering 80-110% to sellers, undercutting the 25% we've set. That being said, I don't know if there are market incentives to negotiate a lower curation % than the official one (I need more thought here)
Having said that, 50% curation is probably insufficient by itself to compete platform wide against vote farming. Much higher and we risk removing too much financial incentive for content creators. I know there are arguments suggesting we can try curation as high as 100% but lets try leaving a healthy dose to content creators for now and see if we can make up the other 30-50% by other means. I do however view curation as a 'cost' because the $ that finds its way back to the voter is a pointless use of inflation in and of itself. It's the competition of this money that will bring value, and for that to happen it has to be significant, which is why we propose 50%.
I share your concern about downvoting, far more than smooth and a lot of others. However toxic it has been in the past, with something like 10% free downvotes, it will be a lot worse. There are some larger stakeholders here who are somewhat pre disposed to what I would consider needlessly adversarial behavior, and at times with much smaller steemians. However suffocating it must feel for them to be on the wrong end of a downvote chokehold for sometimes weeks on end, it will likely be much more painful. We're all human, this place can take a mental toll on me even if downvotes are financially negligible, maybe you can relate, so I can imagine what it's like to be a smaller account getting pinned down without reprieve. However, even knowing all this I still relunctantly support something like 10% free/separate downvotes. As we remove the lost opportunity cost to casting a downvote, I'd imagine most downvotes would be exercised in good faith. We need an extra force to bring down the rewards of vote farming so that 50% curation rewards can be the most competitive form of returns. Only then can our platform succeed.
This leaves superlinear. I understand the inequality that comes with superlinear, nevertheless I'm surprised at the resistance this is getting compared to greater downvote incentives. I would strongly wager that at the ground level, the detriments of downvotes outlined above would be felt far harder than the inequality of something like n^1.2-1.3.
But why have them at all? Well there are many benefits including making it far more costly to price a vote (as value is now dependent on popularity), making it no longer profitable to micro farm spam posts (100 1% votes are way less rewarding than 1 100% vote), basically it brings all profitable behavior into the light. Notice that while 10% of downvotes are free, unlike upvotes which has curation, there is no direct economic incentive to cast them carefully and precisely. Under linear, if people decide to spam and farm comments instead of playing the game fairly, there isn't an incentive to spend the effort to track them down with your downvotes. But this is impossible with a bit of superlinear.
It basically patches up a loophole that would otherwise exist, as well as reward curation more, facilitate downvotes by drawing easy targets around abuse and makes it difficult for bid bots to accurately price votes. As for its costs, I'd say that n^1.2 is no where near as bad as n^2. The collaborative effort of large players colluding to farm mega votes is greatly disincentivzed by a much more modest curve (compared to n^2), as well as the looming threat of downvotes also being proposed. If I'm right on this, then we get to patch up our loopholes in spam farming and enjoy other benefits of superlinear at the cost of pretty modest inequality. I think it's worth it.
The changes are somewhat drastic by necessity because we're replacing a system that rewards something we don't want 4x as much as something we do. The measures all have their costs, higher curation means superficially more redundant use of inflation, more downvotes will be painful, and superlinear, however mild, is unfair to smaller players. But I'm going for the minimum amount of evil necessary to get us to a functioning content curation system.
I know this has always been a concern of yours but at some point we need to look at the game theory reality of the situation. I'm pretty convinced that ONLY enhanced downvoting (at least a component, if not the only change) can possibly solve the problem when it comes to content agnostic reward-extraction voting. I know that is a strong statement but I'm very confident of it, and I will try to present the logical argument here.
First, we need to recognize that anything else other than downvoting can easily be turned into a vehicle for converting votes into profit in a content-agnostic manner. Curation rewards and superlinear curves don't really reward quality or value add. Rather, they reward concentration (voting for what other people vote for). By either being a very large stakeholder or working together with other stakeholders through trails, delegation, teams, games, side payments, or even reciprocal social convention, it is always possible to arrange for concentration that mutually benefits all of the participants on a content-agnostic basis. Since downvotes don't generate or direct rewards but merely scatter rewards to the rest of the community, they are essentially immune to this effect. There are really two reasons to downvote: 1) malicious/trolling, which is unfortunate but doesn't have a systemic effect on reward distribution; and 2) altruistic/community-motivated downvoting of over-rewarded content, which does have a (positive) systemic effect on reward distribution, but must be free or extremely cheap if you want it to happen on a significant scale (which, currently, it is not)
I think if we want a quality- or value-based voting system we have to take the bitter medicine of downvotes that are cheap, free, and even encouraged (because this is the only way you get people to contribute, at scale, to a social good that relies on altruism). Ideally, we should absolutely work to minimize the emotional cost of it however we can, of course, but that must be a secondary consideration if we want a rewarding system that works. Failing that, I believe Steem will need to just pivot away from voted rewards altogether at some point, or continue with a useless failed/failing system that does not contribute to its success in the crowded and competitive markets in which it operates.
It's a simple fact that superlinear curves reward concentration, as you say. And naturally this can be exploited. The obvious exploitation method is pre-agreements of one sort or another to vote on the same posts in a way that generates reciprocal shares of the resulting rewards over time. If a sufficient amount of stake becomes involved in such arrangements, then the reward system by itself no longer incentivizes upvoting based on content.
Note that this doesn't necessarily guarantee bad curation by such groups. The people acting in such group do still have a reasonable financial motivate for good curation if we assume that good curation makes the coin more attractive to holders. If the group is curating badly, I think it's reasonable that competing groups will arise that "do a better job".
And I think it's also reasonable to assume that a certain amount of people will decide that they would rather vote the way they like, rather than join such a group, in which case they will lessen the rewards of joining such groups.
I don't see how the mere existence of cheaper downvoting necessarily changes the economics above. You've already described it as "altruistic/community-motivated" downvoting. So altruism or like-mindendess is already assumed as a force that exists on the platform (I agree with this assessment, btw).
But altruistic "voting your conscience" also redistributes the rewards, just like downvoting does. It's true that voting "can" be directed towards one's own posts, but if it's altruistic, it certainly doesn't have to be.
The best argument for downvoting from a curation perspective is only that it allows you to actively distribute the rewards away from a particularly bad post that is being upvoted for selfish reasons.
In a system with lots of voters and posts and with a more distributed stake, I'm not sure downvoting would have much benefit at all.
I think in such system, the type of bad "self-voted" post I'm talking about would never get enough rshares behind it to get much value. The only way I could see it happening would be the rise of a mutual-voting group of the type I described at the beginning and the only real counter for such groups is a sufficient group of people who vote differently.
The difference is that this has a huge opportunity cost compared to voting to maximize your own reward (either directly or via some scheme). Since the cost is very high, it is unlikely to see such altruism persist. Sure, not everyone will maximize their own reward, but when the incentives are misaligned in this manner you expect the economy to shift more and more in that direction over time, which is exactly what has happened. I don't believe this has anything to do with stake distribution or the number of voters or any such thing. It is more that it is baked into economic design.
By contrast, once the high cost of downvotes themselves is removed, good downvoting vs. no downvoting vs. bad downvoting does not have a high opportunity cost (in effect virtually none), so it is far more likely that altrusim will succeed. If people had to pay money (or forgo a significant payment) every time they edited wikipedia, hardly anyone would ever do it (in fact, those who did would be more likely to be promoting some sort of manipulative agenda and often damaging the end product). But because editing wikipedia is very cheap/free and frictionless, you do get altruism on a large scale. Crowdsourcing works, but not if you expect people to pay a lot to participate. The only way to get this with Steem is by crowdsourcing downvotes.
This not just a question of downvoting being used actively to 'fight abuse', which is the traditional way we have looked at it. It is a profoundly different setup of the incentives, which can't be accomplished by upvoting, because the economic 'pull' of voting to direct rewards toward oneself and/or one or more collaborators is always there with upvotes. With downvotes it is not.
Such groups would certainly arise if there were significant money at stake, probably cleverly packaged into a game, challenge, service, meme, corporation, investment fund, etc. That is the nature of human creativity.
In any case, we can't simply wish ourselves into a system with evenly distributed stake and billions of users either, even if that would somehow manage to work. We have to need to have economic rules which are robust to real world conditions. Which means downvotes.
Well, no. A superlinear reward system never, in and of itself, incentivizes upvoting based on content. Structurally it only incentivizes concentration. And concentration that rewards the voter is incentivized most of all. Content is actually irrelevant unless there is a large enough portion of the stake voting on an altrustic basis, and as I've argued above, it is very unlikely to see altruistic upvoters persist on a scaleable, sustained basis. (Things might start out that way, but they will surely devolve over time.) The only real hope we have is altruistic downvoters.
Please give this some more thought. It took me the better part of two years to finally reach the conclusion that downvotes are essential (and not just theoretically-possible expensive downvotes that are hardly ever used, the way we have now), but I'm now quite confident it is correct.