The question is how will we track and measure how much value a funded project is provided? The question of "is it worth the amount of funding it is receiving?" is a question the community is likely to ask. If a project somehow drives some sort of revenue so that the value/price of Steem starts to go up then of course we can all agree this is good.
But I am concerned we could end up with a lot of low value "projects" which developers and insiders like but which does not measurably drive according to any traced metrics. So if we are talking about increasing active users, or increasing investor interest in holding powering up, or something measurable like this then great.
Are there any current ideas that @blocktrades has in mind to be on the initial proposal list?
There are blockchain history elements generated for all payouts, just as there are for content payouts today. UIs like the many we have for existing Steem functions will process this history show the data. We know who are the largest earners on author payouts, curation, who is powering up and powering down, etc. because of the many UIs and reports that have been created by the community to show this kind of data.
The initial version includes a pretty limited web UI that shows proposals and allows for voting on them but I have no doubt that over time many additional UIs will be created to show the data in more and different ways (some may even have their funding provided by SPS, some may not)
What I meant to express but did not word very well is will the UI allow for us to track the metrics of projects so we can determine the success or failure based on how much a certain project is contributing to success measures?
If it's retention stats, or if it's the Steem price, or if it is something else, I think every project which is asking for funding should have a business plan with a profit motive. The project can be a great idea but then how does it increase the price of Steem or bring in more users or make current users more active?
Example, a game in the style of DrugWars for example could bring in new users and increase the value of Steem too if it were designed the right way. The project could be funded via SPS and then every month report their success metrics such as how many users they are gaining each month, how much retention they have, this and we can look at if the price of Steem is going up or if people are powering up more etc.
So yes, we can find a way to measure "profit". We just have to agree on which measures should represent profit.
Long term, I think the most important metric should be increase in the value of Steem tokens, but it's not always going to be easy to match that to work that is done, of course.
So I agree that other metrics will be useful for measuring proposals, and there's not going to be one or even a few metrics that will be useful for the wide variety of potential proposals. Marketing proposals could be the easiest to measure, IF they can show successful adoption by new users (especially if the users are retained over time).
The impact of new infrastructural features gets more difficult to measure, and I doubt any single metric is going to work for such things. Personally, my original vote is going to be based on how useful I think such a feature is (coupled with the price asked/etc) and my continued vote is going to depend on how well the task is being executed over time.
Can you elaborate on the dynamics of the system a bit? I mostly see it being compared to witness style voting but I know that isn’t quite accurate. How exactly is the threshold set of vests needed to fund a proposal? Can proposals be downvoted or are they an upvote only system like witnesses?
There is a return proposal (which gets votes like any other). Any proposals that get more votes than return get paid (until total funding runs out). Once the funding payout process reaches return, the remaining budget is put back in the pool and proposals below return are not funded.
The first thing I'm going to do immediately after activation is vote for return and I encourage others to do the same, then I will evaluate other proposals.
This is completely backwards. SPS proposals are (if I understand you correctly) funded by default, and only not funded if enough people vote against them.
Instead, only fund those that receive that baseline of votes.
This mechanism is intended to tax the creators of the ~10% share of the rewards pool they split between them, by default, and is the most regressive taxation example I am aware of in the history of the world, not just Steem. The ~90% of rewards that go to substantial stakeholders via stake weighting manipulations, curation rewards, and bidbot profits, aren't touched. Not even the tyrants waging the centuries of war in history left the nobility untaxed in that way.
You should learn from those examples. Kingdoms vanquished because the nobles refused to fund their defense shortly thereafter had no nobility. I once owned Cram's Unrivaled Atlas of the World from 1911. When that edition was published there were 1000 princes of Russia. After 1917 there were 0.
There is not even a mechanism for to 'vote against' a proposal so clearly you do not understand how SPS works.
That @blocktrades whose company developed the SPS code upvoted my comment ought to give you some clue that my answer was correct and you have no idea what you are talking about.
Return proposal goes to the reward pool?
It goes back to the SPS pool, which is separate from the reward pool that pays posts/comments.
It's an upvote only system, like witness voting. It is quite similar to witness voting.
Of course there will be funding for low value projects with the usual source of beneficiaries at the top who say we need to alter rewards to stop the vote bots that many of them profit from. Right now its campaign time promising the moon, then once in place what will be will be.
It seems only you have ever heard of kickbacks. Sadly, they are how government is run, and taxes create governments.
SPS sounds like a perfect mechanism to tax from the smallest stakeholders a flow of funds to a group of cronies with enough stake to ram through their proposals. We will see what happens when we allow a group of 35 rapine profiteers that have already managed to extract ~90% of the inflation from the rewards pool to vote themselves another 10% of the rewards.
I think we both know what we'll see.
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I've certainly had ideas at the past and no doubt in the future for things to propose, but the real idea behind the SPS is to have an open system where many people can suggest ideas and provide a mechanism for stakeholders to vote on those ideas, so it's not so much about my own ideas.
Making sure that we choose wisely what to upvote is of course a key ingredient for the success of the SPS as a work allocation system. I don't know of any way to guarantee such a thing (if I did, I suppose I would be the wealthiest guy on the planet). But I think it is critical that we have such a system to increase the rate at which we grow the Steem ecosystem. From my point of view, progress has been much too slow in the past and we need to expand the available pool of people that can help out. No doubt there will be proposals that fail or don't provide benefit, and voters will just have to learn to make wiser decisions in such cases.
What are some specific examples of proposals that will be introduced through this system?
I have no idea if it would get funded or not but let's say we wanted to hire a professional Marketing firm. I could get a quote, write up what costs and benefits would be involved and see what the response is.
Thanks for the reply. I assume some of the parties advocating this system have already considered certain proposals, otherwise there wouldn't be impetus to move forward with this, so I was wondering what some of those specific plans are floating around in the private communication channels that are used to determine the fate of the rest of us.