When curation (which should be a natural thing to do) becomes a sacrifice for bigger stakeholders, it’s about time to change the current economics.
Otherwise Steem will look more and more scammy, by making whatever shitpost and using bidbots to decide the payout. It already failed as a content discovery website at the moment.
Like you mentioned, linear algorithm made bidbots business much easier for prizing and more profitable for bidbots owners. Indeed, everyone can “promo”, this bidbot business model doesn’t make much sense to me.
I can’t understand why SteemInc supports bidbots so much, even deletaing to the bidbots.
They don’t see the problem or they just don’t care?
I agree with your points, aside from Steemit delegating to bots, I don't think they do
Unfortunately there are relatively few of us who see the problem this way. Any solution will have its trade offs, the idea is to minimize the costs while having an economic system that's sufficient to topple the current content indifferent form of profit maximization. That is to say, we need a new system that rewards good curation better than vote selling/self voting while still leaving enough for content creators and not shafting minnows too hard.
I truly believe a combination of slight superlinear, added downvote incentives and higher curation will do just that. No more than necessary in terms of extent.
Delegation was my misunderstanding.
One thing I don’t get is, since linear doesn’t work (everyone agrees right? Or not?), how difficult it is to give another option a try.
It really should be trivially easy
It's a very urgent problem that is fairly easy to identify and fix by competent people if indeed we are correct
So either we're wrong or, well, the people are all over the place, as we've been here for over a year with no agreement on a solution or even what the problem is
No. Many say linear is fine. I say make it 0
Why though? How would that even remotely motivate to curate. People would have literally no reason to not vote only themselves.
You are not given a curation reward for voting yourself, unless your work becomes popular. It would make things a game of voting what will get popular. Copy and pasting my articles gives them nothing, when they can just upvote the original. There would be no need to penalize link sharing because they wouldnt be getting author rewards for creation but the reward is for finding it. So if something really useful shows up in an obscure place on the Internet, it is a service to users of Steem the blockchain and would help user adoption. It could help counteract the extreme sell pressure on Steem.
I don't quite get what's wrong with linear. Wouldn't over-linear rewards be a great subsidy of the greatest whales and the biggest bid-bots?
Non-linear makes it more difficult to calculate bidding price and voting amount for bidbots. Say, if a bot has 100sp, under linear, if 10 ppl bid the same amount, they all get the 10sp equality of voting amount from that bot, whigh is 1/10 of its full voting amount. Win-win for all.
But under n^2 for example, the voting amount 10sp generates only equals to 1/100 of that from 100sp, which makes bidbots less attractive to use. I mean you can still use it for promo but looks far less attractive as Some bidders are gonna lose money by bidding.
With non-linear voting, we could actually see some bidding for the bidbot votes, as the bidbot would only be giving one 100%-vote every second hour :-)
Agreed, but I'm not sure if Steemit Inc is delegating to bidbots. I don't think so. But again it's the smartest move so they'll eventually do it as well even if the situation is created by their change in Steem's econs in the first place.
It's not the smartest move when you're the largest stakeholder. You or I as smaller stakeholders can grow our holdings by undermining the network at the expense of the larger stakeholders, and get a higher dollar value. The only way for the largest stakeholders to gain is to increase the value of the network. There's no getting around that, there's no way self voting becomes rational when you've got a major fraction of the total stake.
Although, in practice, even the smaller stakeholders have virtually all lost $ value in recent months, even with 100% self voting.
Hmm under linear, it's hard to trust other stakeholders not to vote-farm to outgrow their stakes disproportionately, so in the end, everyone does it taking the bet that the econs will be fixed at some point.
This is assuming that vote farming has 0 impact on the market value of the network. Which can be true temporarily, but is unlikely to be true for long. The market value of the network has far more impact on your net value as a large stakeholder than attempts to increase or maintain a % share.
The largest stakeholders don't actually have to trust that smaller stakeholders will not vote farm. They have the power to enforce it now, although I do agree that power could and should be made less costly (IMO the major costs are either human time or network resources, however Steemit Inc has not even really tried. @dan did in the past, and he tried to make it easier to enforce)
The point made by @smooth is not factored in to your analysis: concentrating SP rewards large accounts more than network effects diminish them presently.
An essential - and existential - problem is that stake-weighting forces all value other than financial to zero, both on Steemit and in the real world. It is necessary to measure and weight other values to effect rational society. Simply attending to finance alone creates a society of bots that have no other purpose.
People have other values, and many of those values are far more important than money.
My apologies to SteemInc if they didn’t lol. At least they somewhat support the business already.
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Who owns the 'alpha' account?
The alpha account is receiving (daily) funds from two of the largest bidbots on our blockchain. Very large sums (300k+ Steem per transaction) are received regularly from 'steemit2' account totalling more than 2M Steem. The 'steemit2' account in its turn gets really large sums from 'steemit' account. Just check their wallets.
Unless I’m mistaken, I believe alpha is owned by Blocktrades.
Ok, that is a better use for that account
Yes, it is one of our accounts. I use it for manual trades and other purchase arrangements to simplify accounting versus the automated trades done on our "blocktrades" account.
May I ask why steemit sent you that much steem over the course of alpha's existence? Is it something like an incentive for you being one of the few exchanges trading steem?
No, currently our listing process doesn't include any form of incentives from listed coins.
This is probably steemit and the bid bots selling steem.
Thanks for the clarification
It has gone to a point where people actually have the galls to complain about "not getting good ROI on bidbots". What a travesty.
This needs to change and soon. Otherwise, user attrition will leave Steem only with the ones who already had stake.
Pretty much every top post seems to be using voting bots at the moment. If you don't use them then you don't stand a chance - especially as a new user on the network. This is a broken system
Yea, vote buying/exchange and promo is normal on traditional social media but Steem is not there yet. Right now if encouraging pure bidbot promo, it will only cause more spams.
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