I'm sure most users on this network have seen the same "vote-farming" and flagging dramas on Steem over and over again for the past year. It's not hard to see that a lot of users are doing this "vote-farming" thing, including the largest stakeholders on this platform. It just means the following under Steem's current economic model:-
- Self-voting
- Vote-selling
- Vote-exchanging
Please keep in mind that all of these are economically equivalent. For example, I can sell my votes by delegating to a bidbot, or I can also achieve the same effect by using all my votes on my posts only, or give someone $X amount of votes to receive the same amount back. All of these actions are the same: vote-farming. Vote-farming at 100% just means using 100% of our votes only on ourselves. This is indeed the best move under the current economic model, which is fundamentally flawed, and a lot of users including whales are actually participating in it.
Anyone not participating in this activity will just be losing out BIG TIME over the months and years. Like I've said in my previous post, someone with the same amount of Steem Power (SP) as me in the beginning of this year is now already ahead by 50,000 SP just selling their votes, while my votes mainly went to curation while taking my time to post. So I'm not holding back as much anymore, and I'm playing the vote-farming game on my alt-account @etherpunk to keep up until Steemit Inc and the top witnesses decide that some of us are right about our diagnosis and proposal to fix the misaligned economy. An economic system is flawed when it relies on the altruism and sacrifice of some users.
The path of profit maximization is again, vote-farming at 100%. This means maximum profit with the least effort. If you think there's a risk of people flagging, sure it may happen. But over time, you'll come to understand that Steem's current economic incentives just makes flagging arbitrary, futile, and ultimately meaningless. Nobody will even bother flagging anything else other than outright fraud, theft, or just plain retaliation. You can put up 10 random one-sentence original posts a day and just vote yourself up all the time while even buying some extra votes for the ROI too. It's very likely that nobody will stop you these days. Even if someone does, they'd most likely be unable to sustain their flagging on your account over a long period of time, unless you're just pure evil. Bidbots also generally do not have high standards. How else are they going to remain competitive?
It's now a move that I actually encourage everybody to do. Vote-farming at 100%. Instead of selling votes, you can also avoid the middleman and just vote on your post all the time for the same effect with more profits. Now you might think: alright, so everybody just minds their business and do their vote-farming at 100%. Under this scenario, what's the actual point of the ~8% annual inflation on Steem which just goes back to the pockets of the voters? This is why I'm saying that anti-abuse initiatives are contradictory under the current economic model. We're fighting against the tide of incentivized spam and abuse. My as well just set Steem at 1% annual inflation without reward pool just to keep the network running, all while people post whatever they want as usual without voting.
The point is: Steem's economic incentives should be aligned to encourage allocation of inflation to contributions that benefit the platform. While it's impossible to design anything that encourages all SP holders to allocate 100% of the inflation to other contributors other than themselves, we can go for about 50%.
This is the proposal. The best way out of this situation is likely to:-
- Increase curation rewards (50% is a good start)
- Move away from pure linear and into something like n^1.3
- Subsidize downvotes (cheaper downvotes, separated pool)
Doing so will make curation more likely as the economic incentives from doing so will have a better chance to outperform "vote-farming". This "hack" is really about giving people half of every votes given out under a curation game. Some of us have been saying this and repeating the same arguments for well over half a year, but not many seemed convinced at all. I hardly expect anyone who have only put in less than 20 minutes of thought is seeing the problem and solution clearly. But that's generally all the time most people have these days. Some of us have put in dozens if not hundreds of hours just refining our thoughts about this one single problem.
Some words about bidbots: the proposal above will simultaneously make the pricing for votes much less predictable than in a linear economy. It won’t kill the vote bidding business but just introduce some extra risk (which there’s essentially zero at the moment) which would end up being more like promotion with less ROI, so it wouldn’t serve as a bypass to the act of holding SP for more earning power. Yes, there's a leak here that needs to be patched up. More profitable curation services should also emerge after the proposed changes.
The proposal has non-trivial costs, but as @trafalgar says it, nothing is as costly as a completely broken content quality indifferent economic system for social media outlets. Remember there's nothing wrong with profit maximizing behavior, one should expect it. The problem is when we don't align it with the behavior we want that's best for the entire system. To further repeat the point, I'll copy and paste @trafalgar's words here as I think he generally explains the situation much better than I do:-
We currently have a system where stakeholders are incentivized to engage in content indifferent voting behavior (vote selling/self voting) to maximize returns. This completely defeats the protocol’s ability to foster engaging platforms that revolve around content discovery.
We need to move away from an economic system that makes it too costly to vote on work that stakeholders actually deem valuable if we want this place to survive.
Upping curation rewards is an obvious answer, but by itself, it is easily circumvented. Bid bots can just offer to share most of the curation rewards. Self voters can spam hundreds of posts and just upvote the ones that were least voted on by others after 15 minutes to avoid others 'stealing' their rewards.
Non linear should be seriously considered. Having reward amounts/SP that differ per post depending on its popularity is the core component of moving away from content indifferent voting behavior. Yes it has a cost, but the n^2 we were use to was far too steep. At n^1.3 (or any crude approximation of this), we should get most of the benefits at the lowest cost.
Downvotes incentives should also be encouraged. Of course greater downvote incentives has downsides, but in combination with 1 and 2 above it should allow for curation rewards to out compete mindless vote selling/self voting.
Content indifferent behavior is the bane of this system. No social media platform can survive if it's unable to at least sort exposure and rewards by some subjective standard of quality.
Note that the 3 items in our proposal have been considered very carefully to cover all the angles so we can get out of the situation posed by Steem's current pure linear economy with low curation rewards and costly downvotes. Just implementing one item is likely not enough. We need 3 of them. But of course, we only want to achieve an intended effect, so any better implementation suggestions are welcome.
Also, suggestions like passive staking for investor-types so they don't influence the content voting and ranking, etc are flawed. The same problems will still happen since we'd still be under a pure linear economy with low curation rewards and costly downvotes. We'd just be reducing the reward pool here to be reserved for passive staking. The shrunken reward pool will then remain the be used in the same way, which is vote-farming, instead of content and curation.
It's my wish that more community members around here take notice about this problem and solution. If you're convinced, please make some noise about it. I've also written this about this a few times earlier this year. Some of us even wrote about it more than a year ago. The arguments and proposal remain to be in the same vein.
Please save Steem from all the unnecessary suffering and restore our sanity. We just need more users to stop running around headless, stop getting involved in senseless witchhunts under a flawed economic system, and instead seriously consider our specific problem statement and solution here. Some of us are really surprised that nobody at the top is onto this matter like an eagle over the past year.
It's a mistake to pin Steem's problems on culture and greed. Altruism and selfishness should be one and the same, which is what our proposal seeks to achieve in providing voters ample returns if they play the curation game instead of mindless vote-farming. The correct move then is in designing economic incentives to align profit maximization with activities that are good for the platform instead. It's as simple as that!
As always, thanks for reading.
Note: I want to make it clear there's nothing wrong with self-voting or selling your votes. It just has the potential to hurt the platform when there are no checks and balances in a flawed economy.
You can vote on your favorite witnesses here: https://steemit.com/~witnesses. I'm also running as one. If you trust in my choices for other witnesses, you can also set me as your voting proxy on that page.
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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First of all I want to say that I am very glad for the work being done by @kevinwong and @trafalgar to enable participation on the current Steem economics, while also pushing solutions forward. I very well agree with most of the points brought up here. The increase in curation rewards and downvotes incentives are particularly significant, as we tried several attempts to overcome those in our product development. The lack of proper curation incentives drove us to tricky implementations which we had to tweak continuously in the way we reward our curators/moderators. The lack of downvotes incentives made us think of complete different ways to sort our contents, compared to what the blockchain can offer. Built-in solutions, like the ones aligned here, are ideal and could lower the hassle significantly.
I am collecting inputs, like this one, trying to have an overview of the hottest community requirements. Utopian supports the maintenance of Steem forks (see @reggaemuffin ' s one) which enable proposals and testing of disruptive changes. It makes sense to bring such inputs in the right places (github issues) and incentivise the development, via community participation.
Thanks a lot for taking this up @elear. Much appreciated. It would seem like a great time to be setting up extraneous protocols to get important discussions going on with good info, and tying it along with development / testnet
Can you elaborate on this? Do you mean to say that if curation rewards were higher, you would spent less on incentives for your curators?
As you clearly agree with the points in the post, could you give more details on your comment? I feel that your words are too broad and don't know what to take from them.
There is an entirely different way to supplement the voting pool while implementing restrictions for self voting and vote selling. If the voting pool is reduced, there would little to no incentive to use the platform. After all it is slow, clunky and has a very small population with respect to other social platforms. Better rewards with incentives to do good or restrictions for bad actors could be implemented. But where would we get the extra revenue to do this?
Here is the idea:
Start a centralized exchange to complete with the likes of Binance, UpBit, Coinbase, Poloniex etc. yet have STEEM and SBD as the common trading pairs. If Steemit Inc were to create and run it, they can generate massive revenue to supplement their Software Engineers. Excess revenue can go toward supplementing the voting pool or towards rewarding good actors and good witnesses. There is no problem getting support and usership as All major exchanges can’t resync their nodes in a timely manor. People would use the new centralized exchange as they can’t use Binance or Poloniex. By the way both Binance and Poloniex STEEM wallets have down for a month. This isn’t the first time for Binance either. Their Steem wallets have been down for a full month before. Poloniex Steem wallets have been down for 6 months in recent past.
But get this, an exchange with all the major cryptocurrencies traded with STEEM and SBD can be created by anyone with the right technical knowledge. It doesn’t require Steemit Inc to do it. Whales could even pool their resources to fund startup costs They won’t need to self vote as the exchange will be so much more profitable.
I don't disagree with any points made here, I think its been obvious to anyone paying attention for way over a year.
Though I would have one major statement to make and one question.
There is no way you will keep profit seeking gamers away from working the system. It takes to long to implement hard forks and is to easy for a gamer to come up with work arounds. The problem is now how Steem works but how PEOPLE work.
This is never going to be fixed by trying to create rules that MAKE people do what we want... If anything it will only make them leave. Then the price of steem will crash and everyone will still be complaining as the rewards will be even worse than they were with people uprooting them selfs.
So the REAL question here is of which everyone actually needs to be asking. How do we provide a quality return (which means, reliable, easy and high enough %) on the investment whales make?
This is the answer. If we can find a way that is better for the over all eco system yet still provides a reliable, consistent and profitable return then its all taken care of.
Almost no investor is going to invest in a platform not to make money. Also most whales do NOT have the time nor desire to curate. Plus higher curation rewards wouldn't change anything anyways. Just use curation bots. Easy peasy.
Glad everyone is thinking about this, but simple economics shows that its the ones with money who hold the influence. So have to find a way to GIVE them INCENTIVE to move in the direction the community wants.
SteemOn!
Hey thanks for dropping by @quinneaker, I think it just takes a lot of repetition and refinement in arguments to get the points through. There's a bit of momentum this time around as ned has considered it in the comment section of his recent post.
Check out @trafalgar's response above. He's answered your concerns very well!
Yes, all progress takes vast amounts of collective discussion, meditation, pondering and even arguing. Thats why this is great. Though with that being said my statements/questions still seem to be the key in that process. I read a LOT of comments including many from @trafalgar but did not see one that answered clearly and specifically my questions/statements. I can look again as its a critical issue.
Best regards and SteemOn!
indeed,most of big stakeholder of sp are self voting on their own post,but we can't blame them if they run and act like that on the steem blockchain.
Because they are investing and spend their own money to raise their SP to do some propits of it's own post.
But still we are glad that some community giving a free curations specially to minnows and new comers with good article and writing.
like @curie , @acidyo specially you and to other steemians who support those good author..
Happy to know it also that you finally run your own thread and being one of my new witnesses @kevinwong
If you don't mind can i know you witnesses too! because i have special witness that i supported if you my 2 witness count's on you i'll take your proxy if not i give you a vote alone.. :))
The past 2 weeks have been brutal for minnows. Our post payout are decreasing by the hour and by the end of 7 days it's probably gone down at least 15%.
Due to this factor, many have chosen to leave and not waste anymore time on STEEM. Out of 15 friends I've gotten on to STEEM, only 4 remain and only 2 of the 4 are active everyday posting contents and engaging with other people.
So I think it is a huge problem from the way the way things are now and I don't think STEEM will achieve it's potential we all hope for. Even when SMT starts, I don't think it'll make much of a difference. More stuff on a broken system doesn't fix anything.
Flagging content is all we can do and as minnows, nobody actually wants to flag because of the fear that we'll get flag too. And whale flags are obviously way more powerful than minnows. I personally think flagging can solve this problem as only "content with effort" (like this post) will be valued. However seems like minnows doesn't see this as their problem. They see it as "the whales will sort it out" problem. I think everyone has to take ownership of this and be more responsible on this whole issue or else we're doomed.
From since I've known you which is January, you have not done what most have done which is self-voting and that's like 10 months. You've waited long enough for something to happen and have been vocal about this issue. I'm with you in this even though I'm directly affected by vote farming.
I'm just praying this changes happens sooner rather than later. Bless ya man!
Yes, the flagging is not effective over the long-term mostly because of linear. When everyone can reach for the nearest switch for max profit on nothing to do with content, there'll be too many people doing it. If you're not joining, you're losing out over time. If you're flagging, you're losing out over time too.
Edit: Flagging should be contingent though. It has some social cost attached to it. That's why it's better to have an aligned economy and just a small amount of free downvotes.
Yeah that way of flagging would make much more sense. If flagging is costing me my upvotes, why not just upvote someone else or myself? If this method of flagging was implemented, I think it would solve a lot of problems with this issue of rewards and upvotes.
You summed it up perfectly Kevin. It's why I have delegated a lot of my SP to a bidbot. I regret not doing it a long time ago, as I was just wasting the earnings potential of my SP. You're also right that this is a big issue and generally symptomatic of the broken economics that have plagued steem, for a long time. I am not certain what the correct equation is for effect of stake on the reward pool, but it's very clear it's not linear. (Though this was clear when linear was implemented from the original mechanism).
Hopefully you can use your influence to get more people onboard with creating a fix. It doesn't even need to be the optimal fix (as we may not know what that is until further experimentation), but at least some iterative progression would be nice.
@elear of Utopian is helping coordinate this matter, hopefully getting the ball rolling etc. The other side effect of the current economy is that nobody cares. Every second you care, the more you lose out lol. I hope the top witnesses are compensated well enough to do so. I wonder if I should make another move to only support witnesses that prioritise what some of us think is the most urgent matter that doesn’t require immense R&D to fix.
Sums up my entire experience with this platform.
Good to hear that Elear is also on board.
Only you can tell you what to do with your stake. :)
From a human standpoint, it's always worth caring. Whether this results in money or recognition, however, is another matter. In it, everyone is himself the best psychoanalyst, how he deals with a situation that depresses him or does not bring him enough profit. The question was always "How much is good enough?" and will always be the same. But one has to face it and not on the surface. To do this, one has to go deep and deeper into what is called self-knowledge.
To sprinkle in a little bit of philosophy here.
;-)
It's a solid proposal and worth a big vote. I don't necessarily agree with all parts of it, but I like your contribution to the discussion.
First, I think passive investors should be paid a return to keep them from mucking with the content through either posting or voting. If the rewards must go through the system, then higher curation rewards certainly would be preferable to expecting people to post junk for reward votes. But it still perverts things somewhat. I'd support it if there's no realistic option to simply pay passive investors some return, but I'd much rather pay them to stay on the sidelines and not feel like they need to post or vote on junk.
As for the downvotes, I think it could be abused unless the rep score accounts for voting behavior somehow. I'm not against your suggestion, but I'd have to think about it more, and I suspect it would need another component to be successful.
As for superlinear rewards, I just don't see it. I still think that would be a mistake because we've been there and seen that things work better with linear. Superlinear is a faster route to more concentration of wealth and power, which is the wrong direction. I think believing that superlinear would work also assumes that larger SP holders would vote for the best content, which is not necessarily the case, though I do appreciate that you are trying to find the right economic balance with curation rewards also. I'm probably one of the people who would benefit from superlinear, but I don't know that it's in the platform's best interest.
Would it be possible to fork some testnet where various ideas like these could be tested?
I've found a place for passive investors that doesn't involve messing with the natural flow of content production or consumption. I explain in detail within this post:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@nonameslefttouse/turning-rage-into-the-soothing-steem-now-blowing-out-my-butt-as-i-mince-my-words-for-you-the-reader-of-this
the common struggle someone like me faces as a content producer here after all these years and I offer a solution that could easily fit in with what @kevinwong talks about here. The post leads to other posts with more information. The comment sections are jammed with even more. People are scratching their heads wondering how to bring new money into the platform and I'm clearly stating the fact this is the entertainment industry and a functional promotional system using ads is one way to bring this new money in. I've explained how, but I need more people to see it.
Yes Utopian is working to setup a definitive place to study the proposal and read opinions about it. @reggaemuffin seems to be handling a testnet so it’s likely we can test these things.
The same problem is going to persist unfortunately, as we’re only effectively shrinking the rewards pool for the passive staking allocation, while the economic incentives for the rest of the users remain the same.
Previously we were at superlinear (n^2). Today we are at linear (n). The proposal suggests somewhere in between (n^1.3) which should be more balanced while making it less predictable for people to put a price on votes, providing variance/contrast, and abuses would only be possible by piling up votes for a more substantial payout so its more manageable for the community.
Cheaper downvotes is more for contingency as most wouldn’t practice it anyway. It just makes it easier to take down abuses or overvalued posts from any gaming. All said, there’s some social cost to cheaper downvotes, but I think the benefits outweigh the downsides of this proposal.
I would prefer a curve which started as n^2 / exponential (thus flat), and then later changed into linear which would work against self-voting as well as excessive rewards.
@clayop had a similar idea.
It's a reasonable set of rules to try, IMO (mostly, see my primary objection in last paragraph).
I've been in favor of the 50% curation rewards all along, as mentioned in my long ago post on this very same issue.
One thing to point out though is that curation rewards are already non-linear: early curators get more curation than later ones. It's only author rewards that are truly linear. Based on that, I'm not sure the n^1.3 is strictly necessary and I'm concerned that it might cause more harm than good by favoring votes by large stakeholders too much. The current form of non-linearity is more "stake" neutral as it's just based on upvoting the content before other people do.
I gave a more detailed explanation of the benefits of slight superlinear in my reply to smooth above, but 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 etc.
The superlinear proposed can be probably as low as n^1.2, and even have a linear tail, so in case the added downvote incentives (proposed 10% free downvotes) aren't sufficient in deterring all 'pile on' behavior, the damage will still be in check.
I honestly believe the benefits we can enjoy most of the benefits of n^2 with only a fraction of the detriments in terms of inequality under n^~1.2.
I share your concern with the detriments of all of these measures. I understand that all else being equal, favoring larger stakeholder's vote is certainly an undesirable feature. Similarly, additional downvote incentives can potentially greatly increase the toxic behavior on here. However, bad it is to face an aggressive whale as a smaller stakeholder is going to be compounded when the gloves come off and he's given free downvote stakes. Also, lowering author incentives isn't ideal either and we wouldn't consider it if the current economy worked.
But look at what we're fighting: an economic system that rewards content indifferent voting behavior roughly 4x more than 'desirable' voting behavior. To win, we need to not just shrink that gap but allow content reflective voting to provide similar or even higher returns than vote selling/farming.
The idea is to come up with an alternative system that does just that while doing the least harm to the system in terms of added inequality, toxicity and lower proportion of author rewards. I think our proposal of n^1.3, 50% curation and 10% free additional downvotes is perhaps JUST enough to do that while introducing the least costs.
Some say just the latter 2 measures should be sufficient. I strongly believe we're suffering from n^2 PTSD. Saying the slight superlinear wouldn't work because n^2 failed is like saying that inflation doesn't work because 100% hyperinflation failed. We should consider the benefits/cost ratio of slight superlinear more carefully.
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.
We could expect bid bots to decline rewards, this still trends the post but leaves those of us that don't buy our trophies alone instead of subsidizing proof of wallet.
The bots get their curation rewards upfront in the form of payment for services.
This should lower the price of hitting trending, and clearly labels ads.
I think we need a better assessment of how much of this is still going on. I've heard that it has been significantly reduced already with the changes in HF20 (which did indeed introduce a slight degree of non-linearity on the low end, in addition to the bandwidth->RC change; both probably reduced or eliminated spam profit on the low end).
This will already happen with the switch to 50% curation. Curation rewards are non-linear and I doubt it will be feasible for bid bots to continue to ignore that when curation is 50%.
Narcissism of small differences is a name of a study, I extended it, perhaps too liberally, to apply here. Apologies for the confusion, I certainly didn't intend to accuse you of being a narcissist.
I agree that hf20 likely reduced micro vote farming. But I suggested it as a precautionary measure in anticipation of behavior that may come with the other proposed changes. Assuming things are otherwise working fairly well and curation rewards becomes the dominant form of profit maximization, consistent losers in curation may turn to such behavior to hide vote farming. It's not as much of an issue now partly due to hf20 and partly because under current economics, one can do it openly. If things start working and people start downvoting open farming, this spamming fuckery would likely increase. As I mentioned before, due to the lack of direct rewards for good downvoting, we shouldn't expect immense effort for it to be done very well. Forcing profitable votes into the light will be far more important in the future as it'll improve downvoting immensely. I want to close this exploit tightly if the price isn't too steep.
I admit overlooked the effects of non linear curation. I did however, factor into consideration that higher curation itself, irrespective of the curve, will directly introduce significant price uncertainty to bid bots. As they run on a timer dependent on voting power regen, and bid transactions are announced beforehand, they'll likely be at a considerable disadvantage with higher curation. Nevertheless the effects of superlinear on this will be additive and very strong.
We have a laughably poor economy that rewards content indifferent behavior 4 times more than content reflective behavior. We want to introduce changes to make the latter to be at least roughly as lucrative as the former and hopefully have value adding voting behavior be dominant on the system. Every measure I can think of (including the 3 proposed) has it's downsides. So the idea is to use just enough force to make the necessary behavioral change and no more.
If we cut something on one end, we'd likely need to up our dosage of another poison elsewhere. For example, if we dismiss slight superlinear, then stakeholders may attempt to circumvent the intended way the game is to be played by spamming more posts and self voting the ones with the least potential curation rewards 'stolen' by others after 15 minutes. Now downvote incentives will have to do more of the heavy lifting here and would likely need to be higher than if we took some of that superlinear poison. As mentioned, in many cases, downvotes are a less consistent and softer counter to undesired behavior than superlinear, and of course it has it's own downsides.
My prediction is that the benefits of some superlinear (maybe as low as n^1.2) would considerably outweigh its cost in inequality, and should be part of the changes. I can of course understand if, after careful consideration, others such as yourself do not think this is the case. What I can't understand is how such a fundamental problem in the economic of Steem rewards which has lead to this platform being completely undermined has not been addressed in over a year. I don't even think most people, including those at the top, have a correct diagnosis of the problem; the confusion and inefficiency is truly depressing, especially as I believe this problem can be remedied. This is why I am very grateful for your help smooth, despite our small differences in opinion.
I know the reference and was simply building on it to make a point! I was not personally offended but I appreciate the clarification.
I would agree with this, but we simply don't know the necessary dosage overall. If you have done some sort of research to support that, quantitatively, your prescriptions in each of the three dimensions you propose as well as the combined effect result in some optimal outcome, you haven't shown it. As far as I can tell, you along with everyone are just guessing when it comes to the question of 'dosage'.
In that sense I would also agree with @blocktrades that it may be sufficient to be conservative in making too many changes at once and try just increasing curation first (even without downvote changes, which as you know by now are my personal view on the most important dimension here, by very, very far) and see what happens. If that doesn't produce the desired effect then we can consider how to up the dose in the most effective manner.
HF20 made some very modest changes and it has apparently had an observable effect in terms of dust farming and spam. That's a good thing, and not necessarily a bad approach to continue (making incremental changes, one or a small number at a time, so we can observe their effects).
Likewise, and I absolutely agree that the lack of any sort of action on the clear failings (other than the very modest changes in HF20 which took an absurd 1.5 years to be deployed after being designed) is a travesty.
As a followup answer to my concern about superlinearity, please see my answer to @smooth in this thread. Super-linearity inherently increases the power of voting groups like the one I describe there, making it more difficult for them to be combatted by "dissenting voters" with lesser stake if those dissenters don't similarly band together. With a linear curve, such groups don't have to unify their voting to fight such tactics.
I disagree. Why should I get 50% back of a vote I give to you or any others?
It would only make whales like you and me very much richer.
Please Keep the CORE ECONOMY as it is.
@fyrstikken / @fyrst-witness
The original rules were in fact 50/50 between curation and author rewards. The "75% author, 25% curator" change and the "author gets most of rewards during first 30 minutes" change led to many of the abusive self-voting of contentless posts and comments that we see today, IMO. Fortunately, the "author gets most of the rewards during the first 30 minutes" was overturned with HF20. But the 75/25 change still exists.
IMO, changing back to 50/50 will lead to improved curation results (better posts will rise to the top again) which I think will lead to increased Steem prices (which will benefit all long term participants in the Steem economy). If you want to understand my rationale, I went into much more detail a long time ago in this post (it's a long post and note that some of the full explanations are in the comments):
https://steemit.com/steem/@blocktrades/voting-abuse-and-ineffective-curation-a-proposal-for-blockchain-level-change
Hello @blocktrades. I focus on content production mainly, but use the stake I've earned to curate manually. I do not purchase votes, ever. With this approach I'm able to speak from experience.
Recently, my content earned enough to generate roughly 50 SP for curators within a seven day time period with about 1 post per day. With 23500SP, I'm able to curate manually without paying much attention to timing and earn around 50 SP in curation rewards. Basically I'm getting the full value of my content because I'm curating to make up for what I lose to curators.
What I see with 50/50: More people voting, which equals higher rewards on posts. So curators can take 50 percent and in some cases, due to more incoming votes, people coming out with higher rewards than before. Then if they're in the position someone like me is in, they can make up for the 50 percent loss by curating others and seeing a larger portion of curation reward flow in. I can see myself earning more with 50/50 simply because of the added incentive to vote. It seems like the 50/50 would create enough incentive to lead up to a positive feedback loop. Purely speculation of course.
If others wanted to be in my situation, they could simply power up their earnings like I did. The incentive is there, and that also contributes to this positive feedback loop I speak of.
I also have a link to share with you. I offer the perspective of a content producer who's been around for over two years, what struggles we face. Sometimes we don't have much of a voice here, but this is mine. Near the bottom I offer a possible solution to some of the chaos we're experiencing and a way to bring in new money to the platform, the smart way, using a proven business model with some added innovation. Power through it if you have time. I feel it's worth it.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@nonameslefttouse/turning-rage-into-the-soothing-steem-now-blowing-out-my-butt-as-i-mince-my-words-for-you-the-reader-of-this
So many bloggers will be totally pisst, changing to 50% Curation would mean that authors get less money per article.
A very drastic and unnecessary move. I remember those days, and we did not have any quality articles. With few exceptions, it was for the most part "circle jerking" going on back then.
We want the people to thrive here, not so fun watching you $8 post, knowing you only going to get $4.
Let's forget about going back and instead speed up these account creation. That system works way too slow, rather fix that because we do want people to come here.
First, I disagree with your assessment of quality "now" vs "then", especially if we're talking about the trending page.
I think you're missing the key point of Kevin's post and my earlier one: the current 75/25 split encourages self-voting of nearly contentless posts over voting for quality posts written by others. The idea behind increasing rewards for curation is to reward voters who vote on quality posts (by which they gain curation rewards) rather than just voting for their own posts or their socket puppet posts (by which they gain author rewards).
The idea is to change the economic incentives to cause voters to behave in a way that better content rises to the top. At 75/25 the economics are totally weighted in favor of self-voters. If you follow that out to its long-term end, the self-voters end up with all the coin.
As far as upsetting bloggers, I believe the final result will be to make them happier (especially if they are good bloggers, as the change in voting will reward "better" content more than "crap" content). The primary driver for higher rewards for both authors and curators is a higher Steem price. Anything we can do that moves the price of Steem higher benefits everyone in the Steem community. Having Steem work properly as a efficient content curator will make the coin more attractive. The current self-voting issues are a big black eye for the coin.
I would be quite happy with that. Getting $4 from $8 is better than getting $3 from $4. However, I imagine it might create a little problem for bot owners.
I appreciate your initiative bringing back some movement in the rewards discussion. A higher curation reward share and free flags both sound good to me.
Although I share @whatsup's concern that moving back to a superlinear curve will not incentivize voting on better content but on known successful authors, I also feel like the overall situation can't get worse than it is now. After the last big changes to the reward system we said we'll have to test and change more, so let's do that!
I'm also not convinced that paying stakers an automated return wouldn't improve the content rating - as long as they get the same they'd get with vote farming. Why should anyone put in the work if they can make the same or more without. What I can see though is a risk that the reward pool would shrink to a small fraction of what it is today. Definitely a lot bigger change than your proposal, so I'll support that for now.
Hi thanks for dropping by @pharesim!
Curation services will emerge out of the proposal and we'll have the best of both worlds (something like n^1.3, which is between n and n^2), just need sometime for it to play out until it reaches the new economic equilibrium. Cheaper downvotes are a contingency and coupled with n^1.3, we'd have a manageable playing field for community self-reg.
With the proposed changes, passive staking could work (or else we just have a shrunken rewards pool under the same econs), although stakeholders will most likely delegate to curation services which should more or else bring about the same returns as bidbots.
Well, probably everything has been said by now. Flags aren't free, they have a social cost. And a big issue in the reward economics is that we force people to participate in something they don't care about. Those will always go the easiest route to make their profit, which under superlinear means automation towards successful authors. With n^1.x less than in the old days, but probably still noticeable.
The reward economics would drastically change when staking is more profitable than vote farming, the assumption that it'd stay the same doesn't make sense to me. There'd be no more bid bots and self voting, as those looking to maximize profits wouldn't participate in that econ any more.
But that's running in circles with assumptions on both sides, no way to tell with certainty without testing in the live environment.
Anything that makes bidbots less profitable is good, and that's something your suggestion will definitely achieve!
I wrote a post 2 years ago and the conclusion is a linear reward distribution mechanism depends on downvoters to succeed if possible. IMHO efforts should be made towards finding and incentivizing good downvoters. What I have done and am still doing is in this direction, see @adm and the old downvoting event. However, encouraging downvoting is hard and can easily be abused if designed poorly; it's also controversial and comes with costs since most people don't understand it, E.G. due to downvoting my witness has been voted down from top 20 long before. I had another post analyzed curation rewards distribution mechanism and perhaps helpful for you. Good luck.
what's yoyow doing in terms of voting economics?
The yoyow blockchain doesn't have voting right now. I don't know whether nor when it will be there. 3rd-party platforms running on yoyow e.g. biask.org have off-chain voting but I don't know the details.
What do you think about a 10% separate downvote pool @abit? Linear does give everyone the ability to immediately gain the maximum returns per SP exercised being entirely content indifferent, so it does seem like an unmanageable field for downvoting activities. And thanks for the links! Will check them out!
Sorry, I don't know whether a downvote poll will work, or how it will work. Who can use the energy in the pool? How to prevent it from being abused?
Downvoting is a really bad idea, it destroys social bonds.
Just saying. "Punishing" bad content should be done on the social level like in the tight-knit human communities of earlier ages when people "behaved" because they didn't want to become pariahs in their communities. The threat of "not getting the community upvotes" anymore (because of bad behaviour) is much more effective and less damaging than outright downvoting
Interesting thoughts, but I am sceptical:
1. Increasing curation rewards
Assuming that your measures would work and it would be easy to find good content on trending since it gets rewarded highly, higher curation rewards would disincentivize voting on this content in most cases. If I see a great post on trending or hot, voting on it will get me less curation rewards than voting on a mediocre post that has next to no rewards yet but will have some rewards since the author has loyal followers. Non-linear curation rewards would improve this situation, but not change it. Under the current system, this is the reason why I have set up a large part of my votes as autovoting for my favourite authors - voting at 13 minutes gets me much higher curation rewards than selectively voting the best content in my feed once a day would.
2. A non-linear voting system
Non linear rewards could be beneficial, but assuming there would still be vote-sellers, non-linear rewards would make buying a lot of votes more profitable - even more, curationreaper bots would vote before the vote-sellers do to increase their curation rewards
3. Downvote Pool
Voting power for flags coming out of the upvote pool is only one reason why there is so little flagging. The more important part is the fear of flagwars - I would love to flag many vote-farmers, but I know that this would likely result in them flagging me back. An anonymous downvote pool could be the solution there - if the whale I flagged can't see that it was me who flagged him, he can't flag me back.
Having been on the platform for nearly a year, I am at a point where I am sceptical if the rewards system can be fixed at all without leaving loopholes for farming rewards by abusing the system. The only solution I can see is that at one point delegating SP would become more profitable than voting (be it self-voting or reaping curation rewards) since so many dApps would want to rent SP to reward their users. For them, distributing their upvotes to the best content would be in their best interest for growing their platform.
"An anonymous downvote pool could be the solution there - if the whale I flagged can't see that it was me who flagged him, he can't flag me back."
That is a double edge sword, and that 2nd edge would have the opposite effect that you are hoping for.
I would hope for something like this to encourage flagging while preventing flagwars at the same time. Flagging will always be controversial, but taking Reddit as an example, while it can have negative results in some cases where flagging is abused to punish individuals or views, it mostly helps to prevent low-quality posts from reaching high visibility
The ability to downvote away the rewards of others is already one of the worst features here - if you were to allow it anonymously, (and cheaply), you would kill the community.
That was kind of my point.
Curation rewards are NOT supposed to encourage voting on content that is already trending. It is supposed to encourage finding unvoted (or lightly voted) content that is undiscovered. Yes, in some cases this can be done now with a favorite author list but as more people compete for curation rewards (which isn't very much now because so much of the voting power doesn't bother), that simple strategy will no longer work (others will jump in ahead of you at 12 minutes and 'steal' your rewards, or even better do so only on the content from your favorite authors which is expected to do the best, which ends up 'stealing' even more of your rewards). Curators will have to work harder, become more clever, and dig deeper to discover good content.
Very true. Addressing that one reason would still help.
Currently, the accounts that earn the most curation rewards are not human curators - not even @curie top curators who spend hours a day scouting for the best under-rewarded posts - but curationreaper bots. Anyone with some basic knowledge of Python or JS can write such a bot and specify custom rules - for example, a bot could vote for my favourite authors at 13 minutes but only, if the post reward is below 0.04$ or vote comments by Utopian or Steemhunt curators before the big upvote hits or vote for posts in quality tags such as #travelfeed, #utopian-io or #ocd-resteem if they have low rewards, a minimum author reputation of 40 and a minimum of 400 words. With some more effort it is possible to determine authors and the median voting time for maximum ROI automatically. Since there is little competition, curationreaper bots deliver a higher ROI than vote selling already, even with the current curation rewards being only 25%. If curation rewards were raised, bots would still outperform human curators, but this would increase the competition of curationreaper bots taking away rewards from human curators subsequently. Probably, we would see curationreaper bots that one can delegate to instead of bid-bots - I doubt though that raising curation rewards would achieve the goal of rewarding content based on its quality.
There is already, @nfc is pretty good at getting curation rewards by trying to vote on quality content.
Yeah, that's what I was referring to, I first noticed @nfc a few weeks back. I had the impression that @nfc votes early on authors who usually receive at least a few Dollars of rewards on this type of content
Your balance is below $0.3. Your account is running low and should be replenished. You have roughly 10 more @dustsweeper votes. Check out the Dustsweeper FAQ here: https://steemit.com/dustsweeper/@dustsweeper/dustsweeper-faq
Interesting; I had never thought of that before.
The reason there is so little competition is that only a tiny portion of stake can earn decent curation rewards with the total as low as 25%, For the vast majority of stake, the return from the 75% vote selling/bid bot/self voting share is always going to be a lot higher. That's simple math; it can't be any other way.
With curation boosted to 50% (along with the other changes) the math changes dramatically. The contest between curation and selling/bidding/self-voting at least then starts out even and not stacked 3-to-1. But the economics changes not only due to the 25->50 and 75->50 shifts (both are important here), but because dumb curation bot votes on mediocre or poor content that gets overvalued (as well as attempts to revert to self/paid/bid voting) has a greater chance to get downvoted, seriously harming the ROI, further pushing the balance toward good curation. But more importantly, the overall economic changes will likely shift tens of millions of dollars worth of stake from dumb voting to smart voting. The talent that will be brought to bear (both in terms of talented human curators and smarter bots) will be dramatically different. (Think NBA vs. neighborhood pick up.)
This is a huge change from the status quo. Not every aspect of the outcome can be predicted (it never can), but extrapolating from the current situation rather than thinking through the economics from first principles is likely to get things very, very wrong.
This is true, so let's look at higher curation rewards in action: Another advocate of 50% curation rewards is @heimindanger. A few months back, @dtube launched an experiment where they would take 25% beneficiary rewards and redistribute them to curators, effectively raising curation rewards to 43.75+%. The huge DTube upvotes on manually curated videos further raise curation rewards on good content.
Did it result in a huge increase of manual curation on DTube posts? I honestly don't know, it would be interesting to compare the curation activity on DTube posts with and without the raised curation rewards. From the fact that DTube has discontinued this experiment a few weeks ago I assume that it has not had the desired effect though.
The huge dtube upvotes distort the whole thing in my view. I can't really tell if anyone uses these apps (or curates their content) because there is real demand for it, or mostly because there is massive free delegation subsidizing it all. Is the game really about 'curation' or is it about catch-the-delegation-money?
Bear in mind that the goal (particularly of the poster here) isn't necessarily manual curation per se, it is changing voting behavior to be less content agnostic and less focused on self-enrichment with no real contribution. That could be manual curation, but mostly it means making the self-voting type stuff unprofitable so people stop doing it. If they instead delegate to even a mediocre (bot or human) curator, that is still better than self-voting and vote-selling (at least according to the poster, but I would generally agree).
As for discontinuing the experiment, the obvious question to ask is where is the money (which, again, is largely a game of catch-the-free-delegation-money) going now and why was that decision to move it made? It wouldn't necessarily need to have anything to do with the curation.
There still might be useful data there, I don't know.
When does the mined stake take its thumb off the content creation scale, and its profits solely from price increase?
I was reminded, again this week, that my content doesnt pass the conformity bar set by delegated stake.
We still have to suffer from the snobbery of centralized control on a 'decentalized' platform?
Hi Kevin, I assume that some time after the introduction of SMTs the author/curation rewards in STEEM / SBD /SP will be removed from the blockchain protocol and will be replaced by a Steemit SMT. So new STEEM will only generated by the Witnesses, and STEEM will become a application centric "EOS-light". With this move plus the introduction of Oracles the Selfvoting and the Bidbots are gone, even Sell your vote is not longer possible, because Vote-Sellers are probably marked as bad actors in the Oracles. See also https://steemit.com/roadtosteemfest/@twinner/road-to-steemfest-some-thoughts-about-steem-the-steemfest-hattrick-raffle-inside
Hi @twinner. The proposal above consist of very low cost changes for most impact, which was actually very important earlier this year to stay on top, but now Steemit has slipped away in web rankings. Maybe it's still not too late. It's just the content-indifference that could be fixed. SMTs also do not have tweaks for downvote pools, curation rewards, and only have n and n^2 without any ability to support stuff like n^1.3 - they may all be important features for token customization.
@trafalgar addressed the concerns about plans to wait for SMTs / GPTs / etc:-
Hi Kevin, short term I also support your ideas. Lift curation rewards to 75%, then there is no need to sell your vote or delegate to bidbots.
I think changing only the curation rewards to 75% is in effect the same as what we have now at 25%. There's a symmetry. For example, 0% curation rewards is in effect the same as if we use 100% curation rewards. When it's 0% curation rewards, users will highly likely farm their own posts only, which is the same as if there's 100% curation rewards. It boils down to what the inflation is being used for. That's why we chose 50% curation rewards as one part of the proposal.
What a lengthy beating around the bush.
The main flaws are:
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The most common problem that leads to failure of an economy is wealth inequality. When wealth inequality becomes too high the people at the top create rules/policies to make sure their wealth is protected so they can continue earning wealth, while the people at the bottom begin to give up because they see the economy can no longer provide what they need to survive because most of the already created and new currency is going to people at the top. This applies to all economic models, does not matter if those economies are created by governments or blockchains.
So if you want to make the STEEM blockchain more successful the solution is simple, you have to create rules that provide a more even distribution of the STEEM that is created. I would make the following two changes
1
Only allow 1 upvote per account from another account in a 24 hour period. Meaning you can only upvote yourself once in 24 hours and any other account only once every 24 hours. (this would not eliminate but improve the unequal distribution of newly created STEEM and you can post as much as you want, it would only be a voting restriction)
2
Make downvotes anonymous and also put the same 24 hour restriction per account on downvotes. I think most people do not downvote because they fear retaliation from bigger accounts.
The two above steps would be enough to attract users because it would force people to spread their votes out among many accounts. You can add another step if you want to make an extreme change by eliminating voting bots.
3
Create a captcha feature on the blockchain to verify every vote cast is being cast by a human, this would basically eliminate all automated voting and force people to participate.
There are of course reasons for and against this but basically a social network website is just that, a place for humans to socially interact. When a human buys $1000 USD worth of STEEM and rents that STEEM via a voting bot to earn interest and does not socially interact on that website that does nothing to improve the website. All they did is buy STEEM from an existing user and are now selling their vote, their purchase at the time may have increased the value of STEEM but they are not contributing to the long term success of the platform.
The real value of the STEEM blockchain are the human users who participate and interact on it every day. STEEM is worthless, it only has value when humans assign value to it, the more humans participate the more humans will value it.
I mainly upvoted the comment for the first idea of yours. It's interesting.
As for the 2nd, anonymous downvoting seems not possible with the blockchain.
As for the 3rd, captcha feature won't help at all or maybe help very little. There are a lot of anti-captcha services and it's quite easy for bot creators to implement an anti-captcha service into their bots.
Bots simply bypass the web UI altogether and interact with the blockchain via the API. They won't see a captcha nor need to circumvent it, thought they could if they needed to as you say.
You're right. It's a frontend solution and can't help in terms of blockchain.
You raise some interesting points. Rule 1, could be effective as it restricts continuous voting of the same content, i.e. 10 times a day as we have seen with some accounts.
Rule 2 would be very difficult to apply as all actions are recorded on the blockchain. Any initiation of a downvote would be traceable back to the account in one way or another.
Rule 3 could also be tricky to implement as well as some accounts are partially automated.
Your ideas would kill any incentive to buy and hold Steem.
Holders of Steem would be losing 8% per year to inflation, with no benefit.
So what you are advocating is for those who can afford to buy and hold be forced to subsidize those at the bottom through the inflationary tax imposed by the system.
If holders can not at least keep up with inflation, there is no reason to buy Steem.
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Humans invented currency to be used as an exchange medium for goods and services. An economy is only successful if the majority of humans who participate in that economy are earning and spending currency. An economy begins to fail when the majority of humans who participate are no longer earning enough which means they are not spending enough, this is usually due to, too much money being earned by the minority and being held by the minority.
The STEEM blockchain is an economy, not exactly like an economy created by a country's government, but these same principals still apply. Currently the main thing that gives STEEM value is the social media website(s) that function on top of the STEEM blockchain. So if you want to ensure long term success of the STEEM blockchain you have to create an economy that will benefit the majority which will mostly be new users creating accounts on the STEEM blockchain.
In the future if tens of millions of more users sign up onto the STEEM blockchain and they start using STEEM as a currency to exchange for real world goods and services that will also increase the value of STEEM. That is happening a little bit now but most of the value humans see in STEEM is from the social media aspect it was designed for.
When a user buys STEEM, it may increase the price of STEEM vs another currency at that moment in time, but that does nothing for the long term growth of the STEEM blockchain. All that happens is STEEM is moved from an existing user X account to a new user Y account. If user Y does not participate on the social media aspect of the STEEM blockchain but only uses their new bought STEEM to earn more STEEM by selling their votes, they are not contributing value, they are extracting value. Not only that, they are only able to extract that value because other users who actually participate buy their votes.
The reason I proposed the 3 steps I did is because that is an economic model that would benefit users who participate on the social media aspect and forces all users to spread out their voting power to many users. If you want the STEEM blockchain to compete with sites like facebook/twitter/instagram you have to attract more users to sign up. New users will not sign up nor participate when the see the majority of new created STEEM is going to those users who already have the majority of STEEM that has been created in the past.
Talking to this thread is like talking to Karl Marx's ghost. Everyone thinks they can create an economy based on their own personal beliefs instead of an understanding of human behavior and economics.
anonymous and cheap downvotes will kill all aspects of the social side of this platform, and will do absolutely nothimg to stop (or even influence) selfish behavior. It might stop some self-voting. But it will also incentivise downvoting every other post or comment instead. Downvoting everyone else creates an advantage. And that is far worse than we have now. It simply changes things from a positive (upvote yourself) to a negative (downvote everyone else.).
anonymous and cheap downvotes will turn into political battles. No different than now, we have a tendency to upvote those we agree with, regardless of content quality. That would extend to downvoting everyone we disagree with. We see that now already even though downvoting is expensive. This would eventually kill any dissenting view other than mainstream.
increasing users to give value to the coin. Sure. Increasing the user base will temporarily increase the proce of steem. But, your proposals (only quality content will be upvoted) will ensure that 90% of new users will not be able to earn. 90% of users will never be able to create professional quality content. So there is no reason for them to be here. They create an account, get frustrated, and leave. There is no reason for them to ever invest money in the system. Your explanation also compmetely ignores the need for buyers. If I AM able to make Steem here by creating content, I need a buyer so that I can use those earnings in the real economy. Without buyers who expect some kind of benefit from holding Steem, price will drop to zero no matter how many new users are onboarded..
At that point, it is a completely closed economy of people exchanging worthless tokens..
I am not basing my ideas on personal beliefs, I am basing them on math, human behavior and economics.
The current human behavior we are seeing on the STEEM blockchain is occurring because of the current rules that the STEEM blockchain operates on. If you want to change this human behavior you have to change the rules of the STEEM blockchain, it is that simple.
The only reason anything on earth has value is because humans assign it value based on wants and needs. Look at Facebook for example, it has a current valuation of about $400 Billion, if tomorrow every single user on Facebook decided to delete their account Facebook's value would drop to $0. A social media network has no value without users, if you want to increase value you have to increase users and reward them to keep them coming back.
Exactly my point.
And yet, this thread is about trying to change everyone's behavior based on the wants of a few witnesses instead of the needs of an entire community.
At least one of the proposals will kill Steem - because of economic and behavioral ignornace.
Downvoting is already one of the most divisive and damaging aspects of Steem - strengthening it will kill the coin.
You will introduce downvoting for profit. You will introduce even bigger flag-wars. You will destroy any possibility of a social site. Instead of people upvoting opinions they agree with, they will downvote opinions they disagree with. If will be a complete shit show... And it will do nothing to encourage quality content.
You need to remember - 90% of users are not capable of producing quality content in the first place. And if you arent going to let them share in rewards - then there is no reason for them to be here...
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Furthermore, even if you have some effect on slowing down self-voting, all you will do is transfer votes to the most popular users - not to those who produce the best content.
And who will be the most popular users? One of the criteria will be those with the most SP.
Why?
Because people are more likely to interact with a user who is capable of returning a large upvote...
We already see that now. Those with more SP, bought, earned or otherwise, are sought out to interact with.
very interesting ideas, I think they are really going in the right direction !
As a content creator I wouldn't mind increasing curation rewards especially if it created more engagement on posts. I think the network that grows around me through this will balance out any lose. Now it seems that most users have more incentive to just farm way their votes and this is reducing the desire for users to create the good content which I was hoping would be a cornerstone of Steem.
I'm afraid it will be difficult to get consensus on any of these changes seeing as many of the people who have the power to implement them are profiting from how things are. So why would they want to change things?
Hopefully because they would also profit more with the changes. If content discovery worked better on Steem, it seems logical to assume that it would get more users and every Steem holder would benefit from an increase in the value of Steem.
I think a lot of people just want to accumulate as much Steem as possible and hope that the price of Steem is going to soar in the next bull market. Devoting resources to content discovery should add value to the platform but it is very unclear how much value it will add. Content discovery requires a community effort.
If we had 50% curation rewards would you consider not delegating to bots? Buying delegated SP from you at your current price would become very attractive.
Great post, Kevin. Thank you. Discussing these issues as a community is how we'll eventually see improvement. It's also nice to see this show up as a Github issue. I also see from these comments there's a discussion on a community Steemit repo as well (very cool!).
I'm willing to support some changes to see how it plays out. I'd also be willing to move things back again if the results end up being worse than what we have now. The tricky thing about these changes is we'll never get complete consensus or make everyone happy. When Facebook changes their UI, people lose their minds. Imagine what will happen when changes are made to "their" money making machine, the Steem blockchain?
As I read through the comments, it does seem like the lack of downvotes significantly contributes to the problems we see. I like the idea of a separate pool for downvotes, but I was also just thinking maybe we need an interface change like this when reacting to content:
Source
Only the first two icons would be a positive vote. The other three would be negative. Instead of using emotional faces (a "good/valuable to the community" post may make someone angry, but it should still be rewarded) we might use a payout scale with money based on a combination of the current pending payout of the post and the additional value the voter can bring. So if a post has a huge potential payout but someone thinks it should be much less, then (depending on their stake weight), they'd select an entry on a spectrum which fits what they'd prefer to see ("That post isn't worth $50, more like $10"). Larger stakes could bring something all the way down to zero (but not negative, if that's not their intention... a "flag" action could be kept for that which is designed to hide the content and decrease the reputation of the account).
Clearly an interface change alone won't help, but I also don't think the current proposal of 50/50 rewards, n^1.2 or 1.3, and a separate pool will help without also implementing an interface change to (over time) remove the stigma of "flagging" and recategorize it as part of the curation process to send accurate value signals to the community.
A datapoint for my position is when the downvote became a "flag" in the interface. That changed people's behavior over time because it changed their belief about what a downvote is.
Hey thanks for dropping by @lukestokes and considering the proposal. Perhaps a UI upgrade to take care of downvotes/flags is necessary. Maybe just make it like reddit's? It'll certainly become more effective with a separate downvote pool and a non-linear economy.
Re: emoji-based voting - has this been tried in any other platforms out there? (that involves $$$)
Are there any other (surviving) $$$ platforms out there? Seems many are gone. :) I'm not a graphics designer, so that was just an example. Maybe something like:
$1...$2...$3...$4...$5...$6...$7...$8...$9etc.
I'm currently been flagged, for this last 2 days very aggressively, and all because I'm posting things that upsets them.
Free speech offends, or something..
I'm posting some political humor cartoon - some npc stuff - , and they are now flagging everything I post, nearly (@bloom).
I'll keep doing my thing, but this kind of behavior will drive even more users away from steemit.
I'm not sure if this helps, I'm just here asking for some support of the 'big boy's'...
Retention is already big enough problem here, I think.
Punitive action for free expression? ( not hate, in any way - but argument ) This is not conducive to growth, (imo).
Unless the agenda for growth, is a left leaning political stance platform, like twitter and facebook..
Any show of support at this point would be very welcome !
I have had great support yesterday off lots of users and haven't lost too much right now with their upvote support.
Being down voted $3 or 4 dollars a day, for writing things that are humorous ???(even if you don't like the humor), basically is a big disincentive to stay on the platform.
I'm not going anywhere, (over 12 months now! wooohooo) ....but if I was a new user? - I would be gone after this attack for no real reason.
Downvoting is a dangerous ,double edged, sword..
I could spin the narrative that way also. What if we upvote the "wrong" content and all that shows up the trending page is total crap. What if new users see that and think the Steem blockchain has terrible content discovery and is just a bunch of circle-jerking nonsense?
People leave for those reasons also.
If you choose to engage in political humor, "meme wars" or anything which might put you in the category of "the bad guys" from someone in an opposing category, well, I guess all I can say is...
Some people are so tribalistic that if they see an NPC meme, they see fascist and think flagging and attacking them is like storming the beach at Normandy. They may even think they are doing god's work.
In online social forums, spreading political memes is a risky behavior. Thankfully, you will never be fully censored on this blockchain. Someone may have to click "show" to see your posts if your reputation goes too low, but you will never be censored because your content is always on the blockchain forever. This is a censorship resistant platform. If people want to spread memes that anger other people, then okay, that's their choice. It's also the choice of those who are angered to use their voting power to express their disapproval.
If centralized services like reddit, 4chan, facebook, etc are better platforms for them to do their thing, then okay. But all of those can shut your account down completely. Can't happen here.
Well, good luck with this. I’ve been calling for two of the three things mentioned here since early 2017. But it’s not part of STINC’s grand plan (and we don’t know what that is), so it’s not likely to happen. All anyone wants to talk about is how SMTs will fix everything.
In my opinion, SMTs will only trash this place up at a faster pace.
I also think that maybe social media interaction isn’t something that needs to be a paid activity...since nearly everyone does it for free anyway. It’s a fun idea, but I don’t believe that it’s at all attractive for actual investors. We may need a better model - a better way to allocate the inflation tokens. And yes, maybe reducing the number of them again is a good idea as well, since there’s very little utility for SP...other than for “curation” (allocating inflation tokens), witness voting (allocating inflation tokens), and then simply collecting inflation tokens.
Allocation of inflated tokens isn’t the end game here, is it?
Well, at least the bots are waiting to utilize them since the actual humans have left.
Yes it's not the end game, although I guess the protocol should at least be in favor of getting the inflation allocated better than what we can today as soon as possible..
It's either that or turn (most of) it off and pivot to selling the blockchain on its non-reward merits. At the moment the reward system isn't much of a merit anyway.
I think content and reward are huge merits over plenty of the other blockchains out there with similar tx times / fees as well, for example Nano which is close to Steem. Just has to be done right I guess. It's a bit of a mixed message, but likely doable (marketing both its non-reward and reward merits). Steemit being at #2000 still counts as something. Bit of a missed opportunity to get it within #500 in the early stage but maybe still not too late.
I'm not disagreeing. I'm just saying that a dysfunctional content and reward system is the worst outcome. All of the costs with minimal or no benefits. This isn't the end game either, if we don't change the incentives. The dysfunction will continue and it will only continue to get worse.
Yup, understood. Nothing can be worse than the current situation. Looks good short-term, but worst outcome in the long-term. If Steem ultimately can't work on its content/reward merit even after the proposed changes, along with content-based SMTs, do you think it's still able to stand out well enough compared to the rest? I still haven't put much thought to that version of Steem.
I don't know.
This sounds somewhat similar to @transisto's suggestion way back. I've had it in mind to create an off chain solution using a community flag account to achieve this but, unfortunately, lack the time nor funding to really make it a thing any time soon.
I had unvoted you as witness when I noticed you had what I would call apostacized to vote farming / selling as I had formerly understood you were against such practices.
Reading your post, I understand why you did that and personally cannot fault you. I think you and I may think somewhat similarly albeit our stake being at different levels. I am but a minnow and have invested in Steem with apprehension understanding the economic flaws and how my ethics would place me at a disadvantage compared to my peers.
I still feel this way but because of my technical aptitude and still considering putting more money in to support the communities / projects that I am a part and banking on my skills and engagement to set me apart from the greedy.
Still yet, is there hope for my kind if the top 20 do not make a change? It's a difficult decision and the inflation is concerning when it is so easy to abuse the distribution of rewards towards activities that are essentially meaningless.
All things considered, I think you put forth some very compelling arguments for the witnesses to consider and thank you for that. I have decided it is best to add you back to my witness votes as a result for what it's worth.
The current economy is directly incentivizing spam and abuse across the board. I think previously I was just seeing the result of the equation (as in economic incentives provided by the protocol) and thought the culture should change. Then later I was convinced by @trafalgar's argument that it's just a matter of aligning profit maximization to valuable activities that should be rewarded the highest. We can have very engaging and fruitful communities off the chain, but on chain the best way is to just vote-farm to keep up stakes with the rest, which is an unfortunate situation. If they only fix this a couple years from now, other communities that don't have Steem's best interest would outgrow users who did not participate in vote-farming by a long mile. Tough call to make really. Maybe the best question most builders on the platform should ask: why fight a misaligned economy out of your pocket?
I dont understand how your proposed changes fix anything.
If you add higher curation reward, now you will upvote only for the curation reward and farm that way.
If you change to a nonlinear reward model, whales become more profitable than new and small users.
If we encourage a culture of downvotinng it will just be unpleasant over here.
????
Good point.
Hi @knircky, much appreciated that you dropped by.
We're proposing something along the lines of "A + B + C = D", where A, B, and C are the items in the proposal, and D is the goal of a Steem economy that favors curation enough to beat vote-farming activities. More profitable curation services will emerge out of this and we'll likely have a better platform. A, B, and C must be considered as a whole and not in isolation. We're not saying that changing A results in D, nor change in B results in D, nor change in C results in D. It's really the best of both worlds - both fast and slow activities can coexist on the chain.
Please check out @trafalgar's responses above and we'd appreciate if you can go through the reasoning we've put forth in tandem. In regards to your concerns, I've almost directly responded to these points here: https://steemit.com/steem/@kevinwong/understanding-steem-s-economic-flaw-its-effects-on-the-network-and-how-to-fix-it#@kevinwong/re-donkeypong-re-kevinwong-understanding-steem-s-economic-flaw-its-effects-on-the-network-and-how-to-fix-it-20181016t060251734z
The downvote pool makes sense in the current scenario. I have also seen the steemcommunity implementation. I didn't spend too much time looking into it as I am not clear about few things.
Both communities and SMTs may change the behavior of the platform I am assuming that it will be even possible to implement features like down votes within the scope of "communities" & then use an SMT / Token as opposed to Steem itself.
Let me deviate a little bit here. The way currently the platform works where Steemit, Inc stores everyone's content including those can cause DMCA either in their S3 image stores and even in witnesses in their servers will eventually have to change. Right now interfaces like Condensor is hiding objectionable content using rules in the front end. Eventually the storage outsourcing has to change. (This is not something I came up with after the layoffs etc.). I have written about it in the past ( https://steemit.com/steemcleaners/@bobinson/scenario-dmca-takedown-of-steem-blockchain )
Coming back to the rules, I feel the specific rules should be imposed by either dApps, communities or SMTs and should act like a smart contract imposing those rules as opposed to the token and blockchain STEEM imposing the rules. When we say that vote farming is bad, we are defining the ethical and moral code. Yes, it also impacts the overall economy of the system. But, if its possible to create independent silos where vote farming is allowed, porn is allowed etc and limit those into specific scopes then the economic problem of Steem as such will vanish. Now, since imposing rules like "down_vote_pool" by a certain community/dApp/SMT will use their computational and storage power on the chain which is now defined by Resource Credits. This further means, the more rules the "silos" apply, the more RCs they will need which will inturn increase the demand of Steem and pull up its value.
Right now to be very honest I have no idea how the roadmap looks like. For example I know that we are moving to Hivemind but for me that also meant communities but not sure whether its happening or not.
So, for the sake this discussion, we can assume that there are no SMTs and no communities and no smart contract like feature to impose rules. In such a scenario, the downvote pool does seem like a good idea.
Thanks @bobinson. Please check out trafalgar’s comments (especially the top comment here). Even with SMTs and communities, they will take a very long time to take effect, and there’ll still be core Steem distribution anyway, until they remove the rewards pool. All of these are a big IF.
Just think of Steem as an MMORPG with SP as some buy-in weapon or levelling mechanism. It’ll have proper value if the game works. And it very likely can - just align the path of profit maximisation to that of the benefit of the platform. Now it’s just not working. I’m pretty convinced by increasing curation rewards, moving away from linear, and having some “free” downvotes will solve the problem. As per the 3 items proposed. Just need some devs convinced about this as well. It’s the only thing I talk about the whole year and even flew halfway round the world to SF3 to remind people about it. Honestly we think it’s just 1% of the effort required compared to SMTs for turning the tables of a completely dysfunctional content discovery and rewards platform.
Anyway, check out trafalgar’s comments around here. Honestly I think he’s one of the smartest and most rational investors around.
After discussing with many others, I tried to collect and summarize the overall sentiment and propose a change that many should agree with: https://github.com/SteemCommunity/steem/issues/11 I will edit the issue with more information as discussion evolves.
Thanks a lot @reggaemuffin, much appreciated!!
Steam is a fast and fee-less digital token (named STEEM) that enables people to earn money, provide a scalable blockchain protocol 1 for universally accessible and unchanging contentBy using their brain (what can be called "proof of brain"), the two building blocks of this protocol, both blocken and token, depend on the reliability and long-term security and the integral part of each other's existence. steem has been successfully managed for one year, and it has now passed both the Bitcoin and Ithriyas to the number of transconsion. 3
Comparing with other blockchains, Steem is the first publicly accessible, in that case, with the databases-built incentivization system, as a content stored in plain text. It creates a public publishing platform, from which any internet application can collect and share information, which contributes to the most valuable content
Among the fields of crypto-currency, STEEM's unique features compare it to both "smart" and "social", such as Bitcoin and Ether. These two new token features originate from A pool of tokens dedicated to creating the first material and encouraging the carriage (called "the prize pool"). The second is a voting system that highlights the wisdom of the crowd to evaluate content prices and to distribute tokens. These two unique features are combined when called Proof-Off-Brain, which is a producer based on Proof-Off-Work 4, which emphasizes people's work in distributing tokens to public partners. STEEM in the evidence of the brain is constantly encouraging the members of the growing community to create social value by which their members build prizes as building materials.
As well as this development of Steve, the system provides improved advanced features such as Stony account recovery 5, escrow service, user-promoted content, a reputation system, as well as in addition to the progress of Blockken and Token Technology. This is when the second confirmation has been given to the users on all three transactions and zero transactions. This allows publishers and community builders to support the mission to bring smart and social currency across the internet
I sometimes wonder how long will it take for me to consider jumping to another fork if someone repackaged STEEM and trim away all the shitty parts of it with a new genesis. And what are the reasons for me to continue using this platform "just because the going is still good now".
I highly value the community members and friends i found on this blockchain. And the distribution machanism of STEEM makes it a fertile ground for Dapps which are highly underrated when you compare to the "Windows 95-esque" dapps built on other more hyped-up blockchains.
That said, however, with each passing day of seeing instances of vote farming, I die a little bit inside. It's hard seeing the democratically voted witness not acting in the best interest of the whole but themselves.
My account might have next to no stake, but you know I'm 100% with you on this. Simply because i don't see another way to make Steem truly the gateway blockchain where that i can redpill my aunt with.
At first I didn't agree with the idea of non-linear rewards because I had patience and hope that SMTs can save the day. The problem is SMTs will not arrive until 2019 and Steem economics right now are completely dysfunctional. It's very hard to support a platform which is neither sustainable nor rewarding high quality content. The Steem of 2017 with all it's flaws at least was rewarding high quality content in exchange for those flaws. Now the quality of content even if it's still being generated includes high quality it is a situation where the discovery process is pretty much non-existent.
The best content cannot be discovered or rewarded. In other words there is not much reward for blogging or generating content no matter how high quality. If the reward scaled up with the quality then it would favor the generation of higher quality content over time but unfortunately I'm not seeing this.
So I could just as well post cat pictures and upvote myself each day to get the same kind of reward I would get if I post a 5 page essay. This isn't to say that cat pictures can't or shouldn't be able to be rewarded or even be the top rewarded on the trending page but it would have to be a very special cat picture is my point (very popular).
It is impossible for the platform to reward high quality content.
First of all, you will never attract creators with any talent to Steem. Best case scenario, is to provide a place that might reward a content creator as he is developing his skill set - and before he goes mainstream and moves on.
Second, most users aren't very good at picking out high quality content.
Third, "high quality" is subjective - you will never get anything close to a consensus as to what constitutes high quality. For example, younger audiences prefer political memes to political essays. Which one gets the upvotes is more determined by demographics than content quality.
Fourth, you will never get people to upvote a 'stranger' over upvoting her 'friend'. This is a form of social media. People will reward friends and family members first. (As they should).
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yeah you are right but I think when someone invested his money on steemit. He always will make such thing like self voting to at least get his ROI.
The greed is in human nature and we cannot remove it. I think there should be some ways so that everyone can earn rewards as well support the deserving people.
It's not greed. It's logic.
It's an investment not charity.
Great @kevinwong. I strongly agree with you. I wrote about this problem three months ago (in the context of bid-bots) and I know you have raised the same issues several times in comments and posts. I have read posts from last year identifying the problems you discussed.
I am disappointed that Steemit Inc have not even raised vote-selling/self-voting to be a problem. If everyone self-voted or delegated to bots, Steem would be dead.
Maybe your ideas can be raised publicly at Steemfest. I believe @ned will be in attendance.
Yeah I hope someone raises it, I think I'm opting out of SF3 this year just in case I lose it trying to explain this thing over and over again haha
Without the ability to stop your holdings from being inflated away at 8% per year, there is no incentive for someone to hold Steem in the first place.
It would crash much worse and much quicker if people were guaranteed to lose there capital at a rate of 8% per year.
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Looks like you are assuming the market cap for Steem remains the same. If that is the case then you are correct. If people are producing content that adds value to the platform, the market cap will increase; 8% is not exactly a huge annual increase to compete with. Take a look at Facebook for example, they've had many years of more than 100% increase in market cap.
We could argue 8% inflation per year could be too small. We need a rewards pool large enough to attract content creators with sufficient talent to attract more attention to Steem. The more activity we have on the platform, the faster the platform will grow. Eventually, we should see post sponsorship as well as advertisements appearing in the posts that are attracting the most attention.
In short, there is plenty of incentive to hold Steem even if our Steem holdings increase by less than 8%.
Hi @kevinwong
I am afraid that by rewarding curation at a higher value, will just lead to a different bad behavior, people will just vote for the same posts that traditionally get high payouts, to try and maximize their curation rewards, good content will still not be discovered. Further to this, people will also receive curation rewards for self voting, and if they buy bits from bidbots, their self vote curation will even be more profitable. Why can bidbots not be banned?? Bidbots, make a joke out of the reputation system!!
Hi, thanks for your input @rynow.
Bidbots are a result of a pure linear rewards system. It's easy to price votes and sell it out or exchange, hence providing an outlet for maximum profit with least effort. Yes you may be right that curation alone won't help. The proposal cannot be taken apart and have each elements considered isolation. With the three suggestions together, the aim is to just make it more likely that voters use their SP on curation rather than reserving it for themselves like we've in the current economy. It's easier to stomp out bad curation too under the proposed changes.
I really hope it will work, and that we will see the end of bidbots.
Its ironic to think that steem inc wanted this platform to be fully decentralized yet not listening to "decentralized" thoughts and ideas as inputs from whales who care. Because not even a single steemit-connected whale dares to share some views and plans.
But lets give it a wait then.
Just to prove a point. I upvoted you, please upvote me back 😂
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lol. hope they fix this thing
Looks like an almost working V4V implementation to me :D
Amazing work. Good job. I followed you, please follow me back. 🤣
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Oh the gall!
How's this for fixing? I altruistically upvoted every comment in this chain. Now, in the glow of warm fuzzies that gives ya'll, if you somehow happened to..... 😉 [was the implication clear enough? what if they don't vote me back? I just threw $0.25 SBD in the trash! I'm sure karma will look out for me...]
Wow! Your pocket even deeper! I upboat you now! I followed you! Please follow me back! 😂
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Wasn't expect this "prove a point" get chained! Keep it going guys! Upboated you! Please upboat me back. 🤣
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I fully agree with the diagnosis. I'm not sure about the solution proposed here - for instance, I don't quite see why linear rewards are a problem and going for something like 1.3 would improve the system. I do think downvoting has powerful social costs that should not be left out of the equation.
I am convinced the problem should be addressed, it is essential it gets addressed. In my mind the way to go is not to "tweak" the curation parameters and the downvote incentives. In my mind the current steemit system only has a monetary layer and it misses the social layer.
I believe the solution is more likely to come from overlaying a stronger non-monetary, social system on top of the economic one
For n to n1.3 has a cost of inequality, although not as extreme as n2. What we want is just 10% of the cost of n2 for 90% of its benefits. The benefits are:-
It's a matter of economic incentives. Check out @trafalgar's recent post and thread on it.
Thank you, I have read @trafalgar's post and commented on it too.
Ok, maybe the 1.3 or 1.25 could "nudge" in the right direction, it's probably worth trying.
It's not that the economics cannot be tweaked and improved by doing so. It can, although expect some of the tweaks misfire and lead to other unwanted behaviors.
One thing that might be worth considering is that at this point the reward/risk ratio for tweaking the economic incentives went "below" the equivalent ratio for implementing more social features. "Below" in the sense that the reward for the latter is higher and the risk lower than for the former.
Example: you are kevinwong and I am sorin.cristescu. I've watched a youtube video where I saw you on stage with andrarchy at steemfest 1. You are a real person to me, thus I am a lot less likely to flag you if I don't agree with you - I automatically granted you the respect owed to another fellow human. It's not the same if you were, say, @xyz987 with no avatar picture. It would be even worse if I could act hidden behind a random pseudonym like @bla42.
What I mean is that a conversation between @bla42 and @xyz987 has much more risk of descending into a flame war and name calling and flagging and disrespect. And with disrespect come reflexes such as "it's ok to steal from that scoundrel I don't respect"
Also it's psychologically much easier to be a spammer and a scammer when you hide behind a random pseudo like @bla42 or @xyz987 than when you walk here under your real name.
Not sure I'm being very eloquent here ... I hope you get my point.
Let's work together on some sets of shared values (a set per community) and then offer both economic and social incentives for users to adhere to the set of values they prefer and then stay true to those values because it will be in their best self interest. So yes, economic incentives, but reinforced with social incentives
I do hope that the top management of Steemit will take seriously the proposals put forward.
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The scary/beautiful thing about Steem is that there is no real "top management". Steemit.inc try as they might, no longer holds the helm of the Steem Blockchain. It takes overwhelming consensus (95%) of the top 20 voted witness to exact change.
And in this case, knowing what @kevinwong proposed and knowing who the top 20 witnesses are, I think 95% is highly unlikely at best.
I agree with this proposal. Curation rewards should be higher but they alone are not enough. The system should not be as easy to game as the current one. It's worth trying out.
Very nice with solid reasoning! You have done so much work for us! The structural setup will have impact on people’s behavior. A good structure would influence a better eco system for all.
Thank you very much for sharing!
All the best.
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Thanks! But the work is really in the developers and witnesses who can afford to get it done! (making code and educating the community on the changes that need to happen)
It seems entirely possible to me that the cryptocrash has caused the community to become selfish in order to recover from the mass losses. I hope the market returns soon and brings out the kindness and compassion we had in 2017
The economic incentives are flawed. People will always be people.
I highly disagree with a separate pool for downvoting. You can't expect the platform to get better by cutting decentralization in half and giving whales twice as much power.
I also suggested non-linear rewards the second I touched down on this platform 10 months ago. I had no idea it had already been attempted and abandoned.
At one point I also came to the conclusion that 50% curation was a good idea. Now I realize that the curation lottery is an easily gamed system as well. Anything with set rules will easily be gamed.
The system we have now works perfectly. It is the simplest most straightforward option as the foundation of the platform. Introducing these new "solutions" to the problem will only allow the system to be gamed even more by those who understand the complexities of it. As you already know, whales are highly motivated to do just that.
The solution isn't in changing the foundation of the Steem blockchain, it's building on top of the anarchy to create order.
The single most important thing that this blockchain needs is a decentralized reputation system. We need a way to organize big groups of people that all share similar crypto ideology. We need to be able to measure who is trustworthy and who is not. This is all that matters: trust.
None of the solutions you've presented will force anyone on the blockchain to be more trustworthy. Unless we can come up with a rule that's as solid as POW or POS or DPOS it isn't really worth hard-coding into the foundation. :(
Our proposal atm is a 10% separate downvote pool, a contingent to the other two measures which is 50% curation, and n^1.3 reward curve. Gamed or not, n^1.3 forces congregation of posts with substantial payouts and makes pricing of votes less predictable than linear. It's a more manageable playing field for any regulation to take place. Nothing can be worst than what we have now as content-indifferent behavior gets rewarded the highest. In the end, it really depends if you agree on the problem statement and solution.
https://steemit.com/steem/@edicted/steem-problems-can-t-be-fixed-with-hard-forks
Now is not the time to be changing the core dynamics for how the platform operates. Complicating the rules even further will simply reward the users who are best at gaming the new rules. It most certainly will be worse. It will be even more centralized.
You base everything on the premise that self-upvoting is the most profitable action. This is false. Working together to give the platform more value is the most profitable action. These solutions will not promote synergy. It will be more of the same.
I would implore you to read that post where I directly respond to your proposal. Occam's Razor is our friend. Adding more variables is counter productive.
This "economy" is not flawed. It works exactly as it was designed to. I think the problem you're having is ideological rather that economic. If you read the white paper closely you'll realize that Steemit is 100% capitalistic. I mean 100%. That's more capitalism than any other so called capitalistic economy known in the world. In the U.S. economy we have a fair amount of socialism. Many services are subsidized by the government in order to equalize the playing field. Ned Scott had no such intentions for Steemit. It's 100% either you have money to invest or you don't. The more money you invest the more money you will make. The only guarantee that a potential investor has that they will get a decent ROI is self upvoting. so long as Ned Scott is driving the ideology behind the development of the Steem blockchain, this will remain the same. Self upvoting is at the heart of how Steemit works and it's not going away.
As an alternative to self upvoting, I created SteemAX via @learnelectronics. I'd recommend taking a quick look at my article in which I propose that disproportional vote exchanges are not only more profitable, they're more ethical. Creating the ability to trade votes is the same as creating an open market, a capitalistic concept, whereby the one and only good in this system, STEEM, can be traded at different ratios. However, what's really being traded isn't STEEM, but faith in each other's quality. A disproprtional exchange of upvotes not only creates better ROI than self upvoting for the one on the good side of the ratio, it creates a much better opportunity for a whale to get a larger share of the curation reward as well as a small return on their upvote value. However, this only works out for both parties if they post quality content others also want to upvote. Just getting into a single exchange requires the two parties interact, which is more than can be said for bid bots, self upvoting, vote farming, etc.
You are wrong if you think self voting gives highest ROI. Invest in trust and relationships gives the highest ROI in the long run.
This is true. But that's not what I said. I said
The operative word here is not "highest", it's "guaranteed".
Also, please read my article, which I linked to above. I think I explain myself well.
Was it designed like that?
Yes.
Is that design flawed?
Yes.
Or you mean to say a design can't be flawed?
I mean to say as far as @ned and Steemit Inc are concerned it's not flawed at all. As far as @kevinwong is concerned it is. It's a matter of perspective taken from one's ideology. This is not @kevinwong's idea of a "good" economy. But would @kevinwong then be sitting with the likes of Karl Marx, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or perhaps even Wilhelm Weitling?
The Steem ecosystem is very new and unique. At the moment Steem is going through a trial and error stage. We are all in the process of discovering what works well, not so well and not at all. Steem should be considered flawed from everyone's perspective. As a community we should work towards reducing those flaws or the impact of those flaws.
New? How is it new? It's been on beta for almost three years now. I've never heard of a product being new three years later or still in beta lol.
It is in beta this long because it is new and unique. It is expected to take some time to get it right. Let's see what Steem is like a year from now.
No it isn't new. Crypto is new. I.e. the medium of exchange has taken a new format, but capitalism is not new. I hope you do realize that many people have come before you, Ned or Kevin and have spent many hours toiling, writing, debating and attempting to contrive the "perfect" economic system. This is absolutely nothing new. And I find it quite ironic that people on Steemit like to "philosophize" about what type of "economy" Steemit should have and yet have taken little to no time to cite, quote or even remark on all the emmense amount of previous works on such matters.
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There are several elements to the Steem ecosystem that are very unique. One example is the rewards pool. Instead of paying content creators directly with Steem, we allocate the rewards from newly created Steem. It is like a mandatory prepayment of content; it somewhat resembles a tax, which is then redistributed in the ecosystem. We decide where that payment goes, instead of a central authority. Though Steemit Inc could play that role if they wanted to, considering the amount of SP they have.
We can choose to essentially opt out by self-voting. This can be countered with downvotes. We can sell votes but the ROI and middlemen (if we delegate to bots) reduces the return to sellers compared to self-voting. In other words, there is no guaranteed method of preventing some form of redistribution of our stake.
The Steem ecosystem has elements of both capitalism and socialism. If anything, @kevinwong's proposal aligns more closely to capitalism than the existing system. As his proposal enables and supports the operating of the free market. The current system could end up in market failure, 100% self-voting and no incentive to create anything of value.
No, the reward pool is not unique, sorry. It's simply a number representing the GDP, the one and only product being Steem, productivity being measured by the number of transactions processed.
Name one aspect of Steemit's ecosystem that performs like socialism. Socialism requires a central authority to redistribute wealth. There's (technically) no central authority to Steemit. And the rewards are distributed by who has the most capital investment.
And don't confuse philanthropy with socialism.
Finally, I'm not against Kevin's ideas (it seems like your defending him). I just think I have a better solution. ;) Check it out.
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I support increasing curation rewards, but not in combination with non-linear rewards.
I'm neutral on the flagging incentives.
I don't think anything will help as long as our largest stakeholder do not understand the difference between stacking coins and building a business. They continue to confuse the goals of building value with stacking the number of coins.
Too many stakeholders are confusing altruism with building value.
If we combine a non-linear with increased curation, the result will be auto-voting to those we expect to earn the most and even less curation.
Personally, I am starting to think the lack of distribution combined with limited business experience within the large stake-holders is a fatal flaw.
Even with 'linear' rewards, many are front-running bots to maximum their curation rewards. If increasing curation rewards to 50% can convince the largest stakeholders to undelegate from bots, front-running is going to be more difficult. Whale accounts can also counter front-running by voting exactly on 15 minutes for their regular favourites.
I am quite disappointed regarding the focus of many of the large stakeholders on accumulating Steem rather than increasing the price Steem by promoting content new users would actually want to enjoy. If we assume a constant market cap, vote selling is only going to produce 10% annual ROI at best. Attracting new investment could do that in a day.
RT
@kevinwong I'm new to this platform and I quickly noticed some problems you referred to.
Today you received one more vote as witness from me in hope you change this.
Thank you.
Thank you! I've been trying but the higher ups don't seem to see the problem. It has been reported since earlier this year
I'm not self-voting these days. It might gain me 30c on a post and I get more than that anyway thanks to you and other fine people plus schemes like Helpie and Steem UA. I use up my voting power supporting others and flagging some vote dampers to try and steer them to a better course. It does work sometimes. What return should I expect anyway? I didn't buy my steem and neither did most others. I invest my time, but I've done that on other platforms for nothing. Especially at this stage we need to be building up Steem rather than looking for instant profit. If everyone just self votes it's dead for sure. We smaller players can't do anything about the bigger vote farmers as they are likely to strike out in revenge. Not everyone is out to get rich. Some want to create something the world needs.
I do appreciate some really need the money. Witnesses have costs to cover. That said, I see a lot of greed and that's not how I want to see this go.
"I didn't buy my steem and neither did most others."
Without making Steem attractive enough for people to invest in it, then the price must go down.
Without buyers, Steem is worth $0.
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It has value if it's useful and free/fast transactions may make it so. There are various ways to make your steem earn for you, but I think that mass self-voting will do it no good. Better curation rewards might help. I use this platform because its fun and I think it has potential for good. Making money is a bonus
Except it is depreciating by 8% per year. Quicker than other 'useful' coins.
So to use as money, there are cheaper alternatives.
Bitcoin's inflation rate was at about 8% before the last halving.
So we are inflating twice as quickly Bitcoin.
Now, yes. But a lot less than BTC when it was 2.5 years old.
Doesn't matter a bit with an asset that can change up to 20% in value in a single day.
I do agree that the lack of incentives to downvote imbalances the platform.
Maybe install a mechanism to reward good downvotes too, but this is pretty dangerous actually.
I'm 45 days short from my first post anniversary. I have been practicing none self upvote, thought that I'm a hero giving all my votes to everybody except myself, until HF20 that screwed everybody including your good self. Since then I decided, why would I bother if my steemauto are distributing vote when my voting power fall below threshold? On the first few days after HF20 I get literally nothing from my posts. People are begging for votes whilst quietly accumulating their voting mana that point of time. And then I found out that time voting mana dropped so much slower then RC, I placed steemvoter to full upvote all my comments and my posts. I've got a very happy few days until they change it back to VP and once again I screwed myself down to almost 0%VP when I forgot to turn off my steemvoter to vote all my comments.
Now, I still have my 300 following list to upvote in my steemauto. But I do remember to have my steemvoter to self vote my own article 15 minutes after published.
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It wasn't HF20 that changed the economic incentives we experience today, it was middle of last year's HF.
The article identifies problems related with content discovery. But lately we see that Steem is not being used only for blogging but some other purposes as well for example actifit. In these cases the contents are more or less monotounous.
And there will be other applications that may be focussing on other applications than blogging.
So any proposed solution also has to balance in such a way that non-blogging apps are not discouraged.
Yes what you’re saying is a fit for SMTs where linear can be used, Steem itself should move away from linear.
In that case don't you think even current applications be converted to SMT, when SMTs are out, each with their reward plan and use cases e.g. steemit-SMT, DtubeSMT, busySMT and backed by their SP holdings supported by BANCOR convertibility and liquidity.
And steem based reward mechanism is completely abolished. Then this entire issue rest at peace.
And at that point, anyone who holds Steem will lose 8% per year through inflation.
Every economically literate user would sell..
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Emitted steem tokens due to inflation be distributed to the activity under that SMT
Where will you get the investors to buy the SMT's?
Tokens will still need buyers. Steem will still need buyers. Otherwise everyone has coins and tokens that are not worth anything.
The biggest concerns that the stakeholders should be worried about is here are utility, and ROI for investors ..
All of the suggestions above are designed to lessen ROI for investors.. If they can not make a better return here than they can elsewhere, then they quit here and take their investments elsewhere.
SMTs that are providing utilities and have developed community - will at the end have to have more SP in their account to develop their ecosystem in order to reward their investors as well as their community members.
This will increase demand for steem hence price and the rewards for investors
The only difference in current model and SMat based model is value creation is further decentrlized within steem ecosystem
Downvoting should be better incentivized, so that the site is properly moderated. Maybe that's what you meant by subsidize downvotes...didn't have time to read all your post
Yes, essentially making it less costly to do so.
I really support the Curation rewards set at 50% and more incentives encouraging downvoting. This place won't grow merely relying on the goodness of peoples hearts for action
Downvoting is already an abusive problem... why make it worse?
Because downvoting is irritating but the problems discussed in this post are serious enough to affect the whole economy, and even threaten the survival of the platform. Downvoting has never done that and it is very unlikely it would ever do that (essentially impossible).
Given the choice between irritating and failure, I'll take irritating. Making the wrong choice on this is one the biggest mistakes that has ever been made here.
I agree with the failure part, but the irritating issue is what drives many people away also. It's more than just a two-part problem.
You have to remember a large percentage of people give up on new endeavors quite easily. They are likely to quit, anyway, because they have little perseverance. Blaming flagging is in my opinion disingenuous.
Upvoting your post is genuine. Using bots to upvote a post to popularity, not so much. Flagging abuse is just one negative that turns many off... not the sole reason why people leave. That is left to overall frustration with the platform as a whole. It is NOT a social media platform as many expect it to be, nor was it ever intended to be. It was designed for bloggers and subsequently taken over by pirates! People are discovering other venues with better ROI's.
ROI, schmaROI. Who wants to make money when you can give your money away?! Steemit FTW! Gift economy is the future!