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RE: Self voting will now NOT be default steemit.com behaviour

in #steemdev • 7 years ago

mmm... a post on the philosophy of monetised social communities - not so different to a big city. I could write it.

There is room for multiple strategies - we are not bots, I assume - but the underlying algos must promote the "common wealth". If there are only the vote-miners then earnings as a percentage will drop until such "income" reaches an equilibrium which may still be good but no longer great.

What then is the role of newbies?

7 years ago in #steemdev by
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     7 years ago  

    The common wealth!? Socialist! It's that misunderstanding that would be good to unpack because it's what many people hear when you talk about social good here. Add to that the idea that a change in the rule set is more regulation and you're well on your way to a comparison with Marx.

    What then is the role of newbies?

    This might be the touchstone of the rebuke.

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     7 years ago  

    Less politics and more analysis would be useful.

    The common wealth is a term used by Francis Bacon, philosopher of science and advocate that science and technology should improve the lives of everyone. Technology is thus a wealth multiplier not a redistributor.

    The Steem White Paper is not crystal clear as to the ultimate metric of success; as a startup it talks a lot about the number of users, but can that be a valid metric: to maximise users?

    Steem's purposeful realignment of economic incentives has the potential to produce fairer and more inclusive results for everyone involved than the social media and cryptocurrency platforms that have gone before it. This paper will explore the existing economic incentives and demonstrate how Steem's incentives may result in better outcomes for most participants. {my italics}

    That's as close as we get to a "maximal social utility". We may call this whatever we want but what it amounts to is the total wealth within Steem. So it may make it easier to drop the economics jargon and call it essentially "maximal market cap of Steem and SBD". Possibly more useful is "total market cap per member". For highly skewed distributions such as Steem wealth, a median of earnings is a better measure.

    The White Paper also mentions the Prisoner's Dilemma but, I think, makes an error here:

    The naive voting process {meaning the proportional N reward curve now implemented} creates a Prisoner's Dilemma whereby each individual voter has incentive to vote for themselves at the expense of the larger community goal. If every voter defects by voting for themselves then no currency will end up distributed and the currency as a whole will fail to gain network effect. On the other hand, if only one voter defects then that voter would win undeserved profits while having minimal effect on the overall value of the currency.

    The current problems were foreseen but the algorithm was not created to mitigate them. Indeed, the subsequent paragraphs are used to justify the N-squared rewards curve, now changed to proportional N.

    Looking at this more closely there is a hidden variable that should be changed: rshares or vests. Changing that formula will allow us to return to more votes per day.

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     7 years ago  

    Well put, thank you for that.