I agree with most of what you said, and something needs to be done now later. But my fear with 50/50 is the Jerry, Haejin, and Kingscrowns will start having $1,000 posts because people will follow the money regardless of the quality of content.
Check out SteemAuto and look at how many votes for Jerry Banfield on autopilot. Many of them are just following for "curation rewards" even though large users like that are the worst curation rewards on the platform.
Users (especially whales) will follow the money. They will get in early and big for the ones they know will take off. Very few will give a damn about content quality.
I agree to change it is easy, Vice Industry Token (Vit) changed curation rewards to 40% in just a few lines of code. It is actually much harder to get all the Dapps and scripts to adjust to the new change than the actual blockchain (outside of the fact it would be a hardfork).
I would also prepare an implementation of separate reward pool for flags. I wouldn’t implement it at the same time - learning from past mistakes where many changes were implemented at the same time and it was hard to asses which change was the cause for certain actions.
The sad truth that the well-known images will always receive a lot of rewards is here to stay. First of all I don’t think that increasing the curation rewards would drastically incentivize even more people to start voting for those well-known figures. In fact it’s more profitable to find newer faces that tend to receive some rewards at the end of the day (successfully tested) and increasing the curation reward would greatly incentivize the behaviour of finding new people.
The matter of "familiar faces" is a different problem and should be targeted by the reward pool for flagging. I say “should” because I don’t see any other option for now and I’m fond of the incentivized flag option…maybe I’m wrong here.
It’s just a brainstorm...
I’m also happy that you mentioned the VIT. Unfortunately they have basically started with the 40/60 curation/author split, therefor we can’t use the platform to predict what changes it will cause. From a very casual look the distribution of rewards there seem quite even and the users are definitely receiving significant curation rewards. I can honestly say that I’m very incentivized to power up even more VIT. The problem is that the its impossible at the moment but that is different story:D.
There is a ton of talk about separate pool for flagging. It just hasn’t been decided how big it should be. 10% of upvotes? 20? 50? 100? Are the common answers. If you exhaust this, you can then draw from your upvote pool for flags.
The problem is the cost isn’t the only issue, most users are afraid of retaliation and even with free flags that won’t change. Spammers and bad actors have nothing to lose and will flag without mercy. This poses a unique problem for spam fighters and anyone who wants to use a dedicated flag pool.
I think the majority of people using this pool will end up being bad actors. As it is, many of us spam fighters get little to no support and no one will counter those flags.
Flagging is a lost cause. It's only a matter of time until apps start posting encrypted text in order to implement some sort of privacy scheme within their community. How do spam-fighters decide what to flag then?
The developers need to look into auction theory and use something like a second price auction to protect against abuse with upvotes only. If you model voting after the 2nd price auction, you'd throw out the highest vote when calculating rewards. That would force a bad actor to split their stake in half, which would limit the harm that can be done.
I think Google uses the second price auction for pricing ad-words because:
Hopefully, a similar mechanism could be found where voting one's true value would also be a dominant strategy.
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Wow you actually made something original. I’m impressed. Funny how you think flagging gives me your steem though
i know it's silly (and looks a tad narcissistic) to ask someone to look above and checkout my comment for consideration but.....
what he said....
tried telling a few whales and top witness this very fact, but hey if they mostly don't (hopium) not believe history will not repeat itself, at least consider the possibility that history definitely rhymes
There will always be some users who operate this way, but I don’t think it’s significant enough to influence protocol changes.
Yeah, he has about 500 followers on SteemAuto, but 500 isn’t a lot, considering how many users have been active on the platform since that trail started. And I’m sure most of those trail votes are minnow/dust votes, so the impact on reward allocation will be fairly low. As you mentioned, the returns aren’t even good for most of those voters, so don’t dismiss that these low returns won’t influence the decisions of curators looking for better curation rewards.
I’ve had a relatively large and influential trail before. I can tell you that the auto curators will evaluate returns and make adjustments.
There is a good argument for this, as it has happened in the past. But a lot has changed since the first year and many of those large voting whales are not as influential as they used to be, mainly due to powering down, delegating stake to other individuals and projects, and dilution.
I think the biggest concern would be the influence of bid bots, but I would imagine that better curation incentives would make a dent in their received delegations. Speaking for myself, I would withdraw my delegations if 50/50 was approved. And there are others who have told me that they would do the same. Whether that would actually happen is another story.