So far this post and these arguments have won me over onto the side of we need to hard fork and change the economics. While we could wait until 2019 I really do not think it is good for the health of the platform to do this. I do not know of SMTs will come too late so it might be better to make these changes now.
For instance Ethereum knows when it's time to make a change. They are reducing their mining reward because they know there is a problem. Why can't Steem? At this point I don't see any content producer benefiting or winning in the current economic situation. Show me if there are any who aren't simply self upvoting or buying votes who are succeeding? In 2017 some were succeeding by the rules of the game but now there doesn't seem to be that possibility for anyone.
yes, I think there's a lot of noise in the debate that's adding to the confusion because they're not framing the problem correctly. The problem is this:
With linear and 25% curation, we have a system that rewards content indifferent voting behavior 4x more than good voting behavior that somewhat reflects content quality. This leads to a complete failure of a content discovery and rewards platform which is our initial mission.
The solution is to introduce any alternative economic rewards system that can completely close this gap so that good voting behavior can out compete brainless voting in terms of returns. Every measure I can think of has a cost - superlinear, x% free downvotes, higher curation % etc.
The idea is to use a combination of these measures to as little an extent as possible to minimize costs while still having it sufficient to break the current equilibrium of content agnostic voting behavior. We believe n^1.3, 50% curation, 10% free downvotes are roughly the right numbers, but are open to any other alternative suggestions.
I think it's at least important for people to consider the framing of the problem and see if they agree we hit the nail on the head there. At least this way we don't start off lost in confusion which is what's happening most of the time.
Why n^1.3,? That seems like an arbitrary magic number. Why not n^2? The only thing I know is Steem isn't working. It seems entirely broken now while in the past it seemed inefficient but not entirely broken. It used to be that once in a while I would discover really interesting content but this happens less and less often.
It's arbitrary to an extent, maybe 1.2 or 1.25 is ok too, maybe we need to go higher
The benefits of superlinear in a nutshell: forces all profitable voting behavior into the light (wack a mole with 1 hole), disincnetivize profit based spamming and micro voting, make it more difficult for bid bots to accurate place a price on votes and hence increase the cost of content indifferent behavior, helps make good curation more competitive in terms of returns. It basically helps prevent certain abuse and effectively reflects the wisdom of the crowds.
But n^2 is far too extreme. There are detriments to these measures. If superlinear is too high it entices collusion between whales to pile onto a certain posts to exploit exponentially larger rewards. Someone with 10x your SP at n^2 means their vote counts for 100x more starting from 0, so it's highly unfair and favors larger voters too much.
At n^1.3 (maybe with a linear tail like the nike sign), someone with 10x your SP has a vote around 20x. It's sort of a balance that hopefully provides most of the benefits of n^2 at a fraction of the cost in inequality. Exploitation is further deterred by the 10% free downvotes (which of course itself can lead to toxic behavior too).
That's what I mean by using the least 'damaging' set of measures that is sufficient to break the current economic equilibrium of content indifferent voting. All these measures have downsides, we use as soft a touch as possible that is still strong enough to break down the 4x advantage that bad voting currently has over good voting.
What about creating a test system, using genetic programming, to find the best possible number ? Yes I know you'll think I'm crazy. Maybe I get a chance to explain at Steemfest3 if you'll be there
With @steemflagrewards supported well enough you can get a return on downvoting, no need to change anything except the non-use of the bot.
This keeps a human on the paid for downvoting switch, too.
The key phrase which stood out from everything you said. You should do a blog post just on this phrase. How can we find ways to increase the cost of content indifferent behavior?
Because you are good at communicating this, we need more blog posts so people can grasp what you're saying. I haven't studied this enough to have much ideas to contribute yet but I'm beginning to think about it.
I agree, @kevinwong and @trafalgar should start pushing this initiative forward together and gather support, I personally am willing to support only those witnesses that support these changes. This madness has been going on for far too long.
8 months ago I went on a tirade about how Steem needs to adapt to maximize utility. At the time I wrote the post I did not have a plan for how Steem could do it. I knew Steem was broken even back then.
Please note that I'm not an economist. I haven't studied economics. I know only the basics. But from what I do know about these basics the core of capitalism, of business, is the satisfaction of the customer. If the users of your product are not satisfied then you have to change your product.
So if the economics aren't working at all toward maximization of utility then the economics have to be changed. @trafalgar has presented a list of changes worth exploring. I think @kevinwong has also suggested a similar list of changes. I think we should consider these changes and what is there to lose by implementing them?
At this point we have a broken incentive structure. It's seemingly not working for anyone. Even if these new ideas make it slightly less broken it is still an improvement over completely broken.
"basics the core of capitalism, of business, is the satisfaction of the customer."
Yes, we have to ask ourselves who is the happy customer in our current ecosystem? Is it the content creators who are almost forced to buy votes to get noticed at all, curators who have to go through lot of promoted junk, just normal everyday users who want to find good content but are having trouble doing so or passive SP holders who just want to see their wealth increase with minimal effort possible.
I'd like to see ecosystem where I could actually spend time looking for great authors, reward and interact with them, without feeling that I'm losing out a big time on a rat race to increase our Steem Power or drain fiat out of the system.
Eventually even if we can't get this change through, I hope to see other frontends as well offer an option to not be blasted by promoted posts only on trending.Ned said frontends could do UI change, and that's actually something I've been doing with my own little project at https://steemliber.com (work in progress), where I hide all the promoted posts by default in trending feed.
With n2 rewards, downvoting a post with 25% of it's upvote weight would halve it's payout = cheap downvotes.
At superlinear, discounted downvoting is built in; which was the whole point in the first place.
50% curation, n2 rewards.
All the stuff that wasn't broken originally, but got fixed anyway.
We don't need to fix the incentives, we need to unbreak them.
I'm concerned that any superlinear reward scheme will shift the reward balance even more towards the biggest whales and bid-bot-runners, it also shifts the balance further towards the more popular authors and away from the less-known authors.
Even now I'm often finding myself in a curationists dilemma - should I participate in the Keynesian beauty contest and give my upvotes to the most popular authors (maximizing my curation rewards), or should I send some rewards to some less-known people that actually posts good-quality-content?
I do have people in my feed that earns significant on each post they make, no matter the quality of the post. I have unfollowed one of them because I found myself quite disgusted of the high reward/quality he got on his posts (and, of course also because I didn't see much quality in his posts). The best way to gain curation rewards is to place carefully timed auto-votes on the most popular authors.
If the only metric considered is economic, then only economic undertakings are considerable in analyzing success. I have attained much success at engagement and gaining insight through the criticisms of better minds of my thoughts, and this is far more valuable to me than some dollars, or Steem.
For social media and UX like Steemit to actually succeed at changing the world, other metrics that are more important than mere money must be considered. It is the focus on stake and stake-weighting, a legacy of indoctrination imposed by banksters whose hoarding of wealth produces much of the misery of the real world, that has engendered many of the extant problems regarding Steemit rewards.
I reckon that better understanding what is really valuable to us will make fixing the economic distortions effected currently via extant rewards mechanisms far more doable, by relegating money to it's rational place in our value hierarchy. As long as economic factors are the only considerations, we will be unable to rectify our societal values with rewards mechanisms.
Thanks!
Money is the language of markets. This is not going to change. The only way we have which is universal to quantify demand is how much people are willing to pay for something. We need this feedback loop.
The fact is, in the regular world rent and tax are priced in money. So you will not be able to pay your electric bill to blog or mine crypto if it didn't generate enough money for your business operation to be sustainable (not even profitable).
Outdated ideology is in your post. There is no such thing as "hoarding wealth". To read that would imply wealth is zero sum and the pie is fixed. I do not see this in the latest economic text books or anywhere so where do you get the idea that wealth isn't being created? Here is how it's created...
The people who have, who were here before you, who are your elders or seniors, or mentors, are the people who you must provide services to. People have wants and needs and by supplying these they will reward you. This is the most basic element of how a service economy works. No one has everything and most people have something to offer.
What this means is that each new person who joins the network brings more wealth to the network based on what they have to offer to the network. The whales cannot hoard wealth unless they don't want anything from anyone else on the network in which case the network has a low utility to the whales. Provide higher utility and the wealth will grow regardless of whales.
The fact is there will never be perfect equality. It's not natural. Some by way of luck are born with more than others. Some work their way up from almost nothing. The people who work their way up in Steem for the most part had to create wealth in the process of doing it. They had to provide some value to some of the people to get upvoted. If you're talking about whales who were grandfathered in from pre-Steem launch then you would have a point there.
The founders do have quite a bit more Steem than everyone else and things could be better but the point is wealth should grow not simply be redistributed. Growing the pie is better than re-arranging deck chairs on the titanic.
Other metrics than money which matter:
It's not just the money which determines for the blogger the growth of their content producing. It's other metrics too but the point is money is what allows for sustainable content production. It's what makes everything else possible.
I appreciate your substantive and responsive reply. You well note other metrics that do affect folks using Steem based social media, in addition to considering how economic rewards are essential to such UX. I do not disagree that financial rewards are key to Steemit's success, but am trying to point out, in my labored, dull-witted way, that the key goals of such media, and the people using them, aren't financial alone, and only considering financial metrics isn't sufficient to reach those non-economic goals.
It is the disconnect between the financial aspects of such UX and other goals that produces the disaffection of those that are unable to define success in any other way than economically, at least in part. SOC (SMTs, Oracles, and Communities) will enable various mechanisms of accounting and rewarding users, and I hope some that better reflect actual people's goals eventuate. One metric I can presently gauge only by the seat of my pants is engagement and insightful criticism, and this is actually my chief aim on Steem, rather than money. The ability to post things that aren't popular (censorship resistance) is another key metric/purpose of blockchain based social media.
I do not see how only tweaking financial metrics can effectively forward these other ends folks have hereabouts, and suspect that such sole focus produces only new loopholes for those who are focused on economics alone, and concentrating such Steem as they can in their accounts. For example, tweaking curation rates can be gamed no matter what the rate is. Non-economic goals of curation, such as discovering new ideas, seeing obscure art or pictures, fall by the wayside then. Tweaking other metrics, like how many new photo blogs were upvoted each week (just a metric off the top of my head that doesn't involve money - not a recommendation) and how they are acknowledged, may encourage better curation without playing financial whack-a-mole.
Thanks!
amazing response!
Aaaarghl ! I can't believe this ! Yet again I find myself fully aligned with @valued-customer ! :-D
Jeremy Bentham, is mostly right, to about 80%Yes ! That is the key ! The "utility maximization" - utilitariansim of @dana-edwards and before him,
But it's not enough, as John Stuart Mill has realized over the course of his philosophical journey
We need an overlay of about 20% social values on top of the "utility maximisation", as a guiding light.
Utility maximization and "social rewards" that cannot be quantified, such as "The ability to post things that aren't popular (censorship resistance)" are not contradictory, quite the opposite, they can complement and strengthen one another, with enough thought.
It's not going to be simple, but it's largely worth it! We are building a whole new world here