The problem as I see it
Everyone seems to be aware of the problem that a huge majority of the power here on Steemit is in the hands of a few whales. This is a problem for several reasons:
Steemit claims to be decentralized but if you look at the power distribution, it clearly isn't.
Rewards are often distributed in a way that many people see as unfair.
Users see what they consider to be unfair behavior and leave because they feel powerless to do anything about it.
It's a lot of work for a whale to find and read good content in an effort to reward people that are brining quality content and value to Steemit. Considering the task, I think a lot of the whales are doing a very good job. Because it is so much work however, many whales have joined curation guilds or set up their own bots to spread more rewards around without having to do it all manually.
These curation guilds have helped but have not fully solved the problem and are now introducing new problems in the eyes of many users. It also puts it on the user base to try to fix a problem with the system. Curation guilds don't even address the core of the problem. The guilds still need whales and the power is still centralized.
The solution in my opinion
Decentralize the system
Steem Power is an important part of the system and I don't want to make changes that are too drastic, just one small one. Instead of rewards being based purely on Steem Power, make them be based partially on votes from the regular people.
But what about sybil attacks!
Reputation
There are several reasons that you can't give everyone an equal vote, sybil attacks being one of the main ones. The solution to this lies in reputation. To have a full fledged vote you would have to have a certain reputation. It would have to be high enough that it would not be feasible to create a bunch of accounts and be able to get the reputations for those accounts high enough to orchestrate the attack. I think a 60 or 65 would be high enough.
A percentage of the rewards pool
I still think the majority of the power to reward(and receive curation rewards in turn) should be through Steem Power. However, you could take say 25% of the reward pool and allocate it to accounts that meet the reputation requirement. This would give power to the people, but in a way that it couldn't be easily abused.
This is not socialism, it's just decentralizing power
This power should not be given to everyone for no reason at all. You should have to earn this power by raising your reputation to the required level. It is not given freely to everyone. This would give power to the people that earned it and not leave it all in the hands of people that were mining in the beginning.
I respect the whales who are in the positions they are in and I don't want to take away all the power, but I do think that power is not as equally distributed as it could be based on the work that has been done. Whales would still have the most powerful votes but reputable people would also be able reward content, especially when many agreed.
I may be missing something of course. If you think so, please enlighten me
Please tell me what you think about this solution to the problem and tell me why you do or don't think it would be feasible. If you don't think it is feasible please try to offer a solution, because I think most would agree that this is a problem that needs to be addressed.
I don't have a good solution @richardcrill but I agree it is a problem.
I have been power-up for months because I thought it would let me reward more people through my upvoting activities. Yet even with a rep of 65 and at 99.5% power, the best my little vote does is raise someone up by a cent or two. I've made an effort here, and raised you a cent, my friend...I tried.
It's brilliant. I have been complaining, critiquing and listening to my friends who also have no interest in Steemit because of this exact problem. IT'S A HUGE PROBLEM! I came up with a similar solution as well. Something needs to change if we are to see more user retention.
Users see what they consider to be unfair behavior and leave because they feel powerless to do anything about it.
Users see what they consider to be unfair behavior and leave because they feel powerless to do anything about it.
Users see what they consider to be unfair behavior and leave because they feel powerless to do anything about it.
Users see what they consider to be unfair behavior and leave because they feel powerless to do anything about it.
goodbye
I would be very grateful if you considered reading my idea to create a better enviroment especially for new users. It wouldn't solve any issue fully, but I think it would impact a lot of areas in a very positive way.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@hilarski/steemit-referral-program-and-incentives#@the-ego-is-you/re-hilarski-steemit-referral-program-and-incentives-20161224t190500192z
While the centralization of power is an issue for Steemit currently, the power will decentralize over time. We are still in the very early stages of Steemit, and right now the 'whales' are mostly looking to promote people and content that will help the platform improve. If we were 10 days away from the "mainstream launch" and we had the same distribution problem - I would agree with you 100%. Seeing that we are still in beta though, and from what I understand - still a ways away from going mainstream - it is a lot less of an issue.
I do like that you are proposing a constructive solution to the problem though.
There are a few issues with it though:
Curation guilds (at a blockchain level, not at the community organized level) do have the possibility of addressing this. If a whale has the ability to delegate a portion of their voting power to a curation guild, and the guild members (through voting) can earn a portion of the curation rewards - then it essentially provides a way for whales to 'give away' some of their voting power + influence, along with the rewards - while still maintaining the original 'contract' that says they ultimately get to chose how to use their influence. (If they chose to delegate it - then that is still 'allowed'.)
There are many people in the community though that are thinking long and hard about this problem. Pretty much everyone realizes that the situation we have today is not going to be acceptable in order to go mainstream and attract billions of users. Things do have to change.
@dantheman did mention in a comment a few weeks back that they have ideas to address the issue. I don't know what to expect as far as their roadmap, but it will be interesting to see if anything on there will help.
The problem with allowing this issue to continue to fester is that Steemit's reputation is very low right now among the people who have come and gone. Reputations can make or break a site very quickly. It's like having an STD: even if you go to the doctor to get your sores treated, everyone will remember that you have a nasty STD. The sooner this issue is addressed and fixed, the better. Waiting would be a mistake....
The urgency depends on where we are as far as ready to go mainstream. If we are (hypothetically) not planning to scale to billions of users for another 2-3 years, then we have 2-3 years to solve the distribution problem.
I'm not saying it is not something that needs to be resolved, or arguing with the fact that it is harming the user experience and retention in the meantime.
How we ultimately solve it is going to be very important though. IMO, it is more important that we do it 'right' than 'quick'.
I could not agree more - try to get it right with consideration all ways round rather than get it wrong quickly. There is always the other side of that coin which is that if you make a decision which turns out a bit wrong, just make another decision.
In this context though, two things spring to mind: a few bad decisions have been made and no follow-up decision has been made. Where is the policy unit? Where is the decision making process run from and how can one make representations?
Secondly, 2-3 years away is a timescale which I would refer to as being [you know me @timcliff] the sort of approach considered to be slovenly by an exercise-averse sloth!
Blockchain years are the new silicon chip years!
Other considerations: if anyone expects to have a return on time invested, where do I fill out my time sheet?
If anyone expects special treatment for what they do, I do too!
There are some very perverse perspectives about time, investment etc. Caveat Emptor. Or, as the TV stations should say more often, if you do not like it, watch another channel!
Some good points raised here. It's tough to be patient but if we keep plugging away and enjoy ourselves we might be suprised where it will take us.
@kus-knee (The Old Dog)
Agreed.
@kus-knee exactly - enjoy the ride
we didn't have equal shares and some had more investments here - I don't see why they shouldn't have more of the VP at least I think so I let go of this a long time ago
Just write our asses off and focus on to making this platform big be grateful we got invited to their party and like you said have fun
Agreed.
I don't know how guilds at the blockchain level would work. How would whales share their posting keys without people abusing it and how would the power be split equally among all participants ( that would also break the contract btw) A trustless guild would solve a lot of problem but is it technically doable?
What I have in my head is just an idea / proposal, but it could be done. If it were done at the blockchain level, then there would be no need to share keys. The whales could allocate power voting to the guild, and then the blockchain could automatically distribute the SP based on the votes of the guild members. There are a lot of details to iron out though. It will be interesting to see if anything along these lines is in the upcoming roadmap.
I didn't know voting power was transferable this way , is it really?
That would mean whales would have to vote to the guild every 24 hours right? They could probably set up a bot to do it.
What will be the incentives for whales to allocate their voting power since they could earn curation rewards with a bot?
It is not something that is supported currently. It would require a change to the blockchain to add the curation guild functionality.
There are a lot of implementation details that would need to be ironed out. I suspect that if they did it, the SP would be allocated to the guild unless/until the whale decided to unallocate it.
One reason would be that a good curation guild could potentially earn better curation rewards than a "dumb bot". Also, whales could support guilds that were voting on the type of content that they felt was advancing the platform - without having to acutely curate and read all of the posts themselves.
I would say bots are a lot smarter than manual curators. Most people have no idea about the 30 min rules for example. Every bots knows about it.
Also bots can upvote much faster so they always outpace manual curators. If you look at the curation rank, all the top curators are bots.
I've subscribed to biophil's bot and everytime I vote manually it reduces my score, I need to let the bot do the work if I want to keep the same curation score. The only way manual curators can earn more than bots is if a really great post from a new author is only noticed late by the community( which is very rare). Manual curators stand no chance against bots.
If curators of a guilds are bots too then whales will just chose guilds with best curation score or as you say guilds voting for specific stuff
Replying here.
Bots have a lot of advantages over humans, but there are a lot of things that smart human curators can do better than the bots that exist today. Especially if the humans band together in teams/guilds and work together rather than individually.
The bot vs. human competition will be a fun thing to watch over the coming years :)
Thanks for the feedback! Good points too, however, I think the whales would still retain plenty of influence, but the people would who have put in time and effort as well would finally have some influence as well. And I don't think it would be easy enough to get a lot of bot accounts to that high of a reputation. If it is, then the reputation system is flawed and would need fixing.
Unfortunately, it is still a violation of the contract / agreement that was made with the existing SP holders.
I would probably put myself in that category. I've put a lot of time and effort into the site and community since I have joined in July. I have 27 MV of Steem Power now. It is nowhere near 'whale' status yet, but I have a lot more influence today than when I joined. Getting to whale status, as well as bringing the site to the point that my 27 MV are worth millions are two things that keep me going ;)
You underestimate people's ability to game the system :) The current reputation system is flawed, and it would need major fixing if it were to be used for that type of purpose. Just as one example - I believe a user like @blocktrades can upvote a new user's post, and they will instantly jump from 25 to around 50. [Edit] It was really designed with a specific purpose in mind - to deal with spam and abuse issues. For what it was designed for - it is not perfect, but it handles things fairly well.
It's all too easy for those without to want what those with have. It's the politics of envy. Breaking the "social contract" and taking any of the properly earned rewards to distribute to others is socialisitic. Sure it also accomplishes decentralization but at the expense of a broken promise and platform reputation.
I'm only a minor minnow who might benefit from the distribution that @richardcrill suggests, but I'm still opposed to a redistribution that robs those who earned what they have. I'm opposed on principle.
As to solutions I have none to offer. Perhaps b/c I don't understand how or why the imbalance of power came to be. Perhaps the size and scope of some peoples holdings is far to large for me to fathom (if 27 MV is 27 million vests and each is worth $0.16 that's over $4 MILLION) in relation to the entire ecosystem.
The solution to the problem may be beyond my paygrade to resolve or even comprehend but I definitely know the difference between right and wrong and theft is always wrong. There's got to be a better solution.
Very well said!
I completely agree with your reasoning for being against it. Even if it is better for the site, community, and user retention - if it violates the existing contract, then it is not right (IMO).
As far as the initial distribution, many of the whales were the ones that worked on the code, or hosted the servers, or did other various things to create the infrastructure to create/run the blockchain in the early days. Some others invested a lot.
The distribution is not quite that bad. MVests is kind of a wired unit. My 27 MVests is about 13,000 STEEM. @ned's account - which is pretty much the largest, has about 5.7 million STEEM. One day I hope to be like @ned :)
Great answers, Tim.
I'll add that, generally speaking, the people who make such proposals have much to gain and nothing to lose. The idea that the platform will win is spurious, at best.
If someone bought APPL in 2000, the people who bought in 2015 don't cry that it's not fair. They recognize that they got in the game later. Folks in Steemit need to recignize the same thing. I missed the early boat and got in as the celebrity wave was rising. My major investments have been all the way from about $1.50 to the bottom. If I'd waited to invest until now, I'd have a few times my current SP. But I have what I have and I'm confident that it'll grow. I've earned and invested in it. I have more voting power because of it. Will that be adjusted (up or down?) because someone thinks it's not fair?
I'm sorry. I'm uninformed here. How exactly would it violate the contract?
Every single person that has SP today (no matter what the amount or when it was acquired) earned/bought that SP under the premise that the SP would give them influence over the site's rewards pool. There are people that invested heavily early on specifically so they would get that power. If the rules were changed such that your SP only gave you power over 75% of the reward pool - then it is violating the agreement with everyone who currently has SP.
Imagine you were founding a startup company, and you got 5 venture capitalists to invest in your company. You formed an agreement with each of them that they would provide services/funds in exchange for 10% control of the company (each). Then a year later after the company started to grow, you decided to say well, actually - we are only going to give you each 7.5% control now. We want to take the other 2.5% and give it to our employees, so that they have a say in the way things are done as well. That would be a violation of the contract that you formed with the original shareholders.
[Edit] Updated the numbers of the example to better line up with the percentages in your proposal.
Thats exactly why I have bought and earned SP and I still have no real influence or any real hope of getting any under the current system.
I am not saying that the fact you cannot easily acquire influence right now is not a problem. I agree it is a problem.
There is a huge difference though between your issue though (you did not get as much influence as you had hoped/wanted/expected) and a violation of contract.
Any SP that you bought and earned is following the rules of the blockchain. You may have thought/hoped/expected that it would give you more influence than it did - but that is not a breach of contract. The blockchain is still following the same rules for you that it does for everyone else, which is that you have a stake-weighted influence in the rewards pool, based on the amount of your vested shares compared to the total.
"There are many people in the community though that are thinking long and hard about this problem."
That's the part that gives me faith in this platform even with its flaws! Great post OP!
What do you think about my related idea of "hindsight rewards"? Would you consider it something that violated this agreement?
https://steemit.com/steemit/@hilarski/steemit-referral-program-and-incentives#@the-ego-is-you/re-hilarski-steemit-referral-program-and-incentives-20161224t190500192z
Also, can we get something straight... are we talking about an actual verbal agreement, an expectation or a "social contract" (popular perception, in some cases used as a BS argument for real world conscription)?
It's a really interesting idea, and I am not opposed to it.
The biggest challenge is that something like that would be really difficult to implement at a blockchain level. Someone really smart would need to spend a lot of time and effort in order to figure out how to make it work.
Also, there would be ways for malicious users to game the system by creating and posting from new accounts.
They are not mutually exclusive ideas, but personally I would rather see an actual referral program.
That is a really great question!
It is definitely not a full blown contract in the legal sense. It is closer to a social agreement. Nobody ever said that the blockchain rules wouldn't change.
That said though - people who invest in a crypto coin like BTC or STEEM are doing so with the understanding that the blockchain code works a certain way, and follows certain rules. To change the rules means that the people who bought the 'product' no longer have what they paid for. It is a violation in that sense.
There are two problems with changes like this:
Upvoted and resteemed because I too think this is a major problem that needs to be addressed. Also, this particular problem has become incredibly relevant recently as this whole flag war thing has really put off a lot of people that would otherwise be highly active members.
Interesting idea. It seems feasible (no major problems that we don't see), but I'm not sure. I think most people wouldn't object to this IF it's doable. Let's find out... resteemed! hehe.
I like the proposal. I would go as far as saying that there should be 50% payout distributed through STEEM power, and 50% distributed through reputation.
This may be getting a little complex, but I also feel that if you were rewarded more per vote depending on the reputation that your account holds, then that would encourage users to stick with the site and push for a higher rep so that they will reach a point where they know they will be rewarded for the time they have invested into the site.
I don't know how that would play out in the long run when a vast number of people reach level 75+, but as long as the value of STEEM increases with the reputation of the users--which I think it will, especially with some of these changes--then it should be sustainable.
The whales would need something in return for their sacrifice though. If the more STEEM power you hold, the faster your reputation grows(not excessively though), then that could serve as the whales getting something back for what they have lost, as well as encouraging them to make more posts to take advantage of their faster growing reputation.
This would make downvotes so much more damaging however, so there would have to be some sort of way to reverse downvotes through user consensus. This could be established through a function on the site which allows users to vote on the validity of downvotes for very small rewards of STEEM. If more than 75% of users vote for a downvote to be overturned, then the downvote would be reversed and applied to the person who used it on another user, so this will make people think twice before downvoting for insignificant reasons.
This is getting way too complicated and I'm half asleep, so these ideas are probably rather out there.
The fact that reading your piece has just sparked my mind into creating these ideas, whether they're good or not, is testimony to the thought-provoking nature of your post.
Upvoted, followed and resteemed.
Judging from your comment, you might be interested in my previously mentioned idea. I would like to get any constructive criticism (positive, negative or ambivalent) on it.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@hilarski/steemit-referral-program-and-incentives#@the-ego-is-you/re-hilarski-steemit-referral-program-and-incentives-20161224t190500192z
I'm about to take the dogs out, but I will give it a read later and let you know what I think.
Am so glad that more people have faith in the steemit platform and contributing serious for the long term and benefits of steemit. I greatly give thanks to author of this article for his good work. CHEERS! AND GODSPEED
I too believe reputation should be the criteria in the reward equation, and not SP. Our reputations, ATM, just sits there like a trophy, and is not linked in any way with reward distribution, and I feel this must change.
In fact I had written a post regarding this, a few days back.
I really appreciate your efforts.
I do fundamentally disagree with you. I don't think whales are a problem and I don't think we have centralization issue. Yes there are very rich people here but there always will be rich people that have more power as a result of it.
What is a problem is the exponential reward system. That is the reason that smaller sp holders have little impact.
If someone is 100 x as rich as I am his voting power over me is not 100 as high. It is exponentially higher.That is what makes steem unfair and concentrates rewards to very very few. Anything else has pretty much no impact. In other words even if we would get rid of SP voting and somehow would
have Sybil attacks solved, steem would work just the same as now, with very few getting huge rewards.
This is an excellent observation. If the scaling curve were reduced for rewards it would balance things out over time. Also changing this wouldn't violate anyone's holdings; it's only a policy change, an adjustment of the platform's distribution of power between those with a lower stake to those with a higher one.
Yes, this is an interesting observation that I wish I could confirm or write off.
Would you be so kind as to have a look at my idea related to these issues? I think it would really go a long way towards making the system a whole lot better, because it would impact so many areas. It is however not a complete solution towards any particular problem.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@hilarski/steemit-referral-program-and-incentives#@the-ego-is-you/re-hilarski-steemit-referral-program-and-incentives-20161224t190500192z
this seems to address the power inequity, in part. i'm not sure how a redistribution would happen. i was toying with the idea of, instead, or in addition to, giving power to the poor in SP, putting limiters on the power of the rich in SP, who do not add value to the platform. some whales flail about, expressing their opinions with flags, and if their blog is examined, it can be seen that they add no valuable content to the platform whatever. what would be used as a gauge, i don't know. perhaps it could be the number of votes the person has accumulated in addition to their number of blog posts, someone who knows this better than i would be welcome in this part of the discussion.. some way needs to be devised to stop rich asses, from buying a lot of SP and then crapping all over those who are actually adding value.
also, why are bots allowed to deplete the reward pool? they're bots, this is obvious gaming of the system to deplete the reward pool. there is no added value here.
The time is now! We must shift to decentralized uncensorable platforms.
https://steemit.com/freespeech/@woocharlie/the-time-is-now-we-must-shift-to-decentralized-uncensorable-platforms
First I want to point out that the decentralization of voting power does not seem to have ever been a goal of the Steem and Steemit creators, rather it is a decentralization of blockchain trust, to stop the manipulation of content, censorship and re-writing the history of the blockchain. In fact, the whale effect looks to have been intentional as a reward to those who deserve it.
However the issue remains for the rest of us non-whales. I think your ideas might be welcome to the community at large, I would certainly consider supporting them. Curation rewards are something that could easily be tweaked if a consensus was reached.
I had a look through the GitHub issues for you to see if something similar to this has already been raised. It's not just for technical issues but also the "business logic" of the platform. Here's what I found:
Redefine long term voting rules #177
https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/177
There is some great discussion here along the same lines as your thinking but with a different solution which has already been implemented in hardfork 9 it looks like as the issue is closed.
Disable Curation Rewards - Proposed Change #75
https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/75
Kind of along the same lines, at least talking about actually removing curation rewards back in June, but this was rejected as the devs felt it was dealt with in a different fix which adjusted the curve (see issue Unbalanced Curation Rewards #110).
I suggest you raise it on GitHub and see what happens. I'll keep an eye out for it if you do.
Lastly, as a another resource, @dantheman talked about this problem in a great post from 5 months ago, Curation Rewards and Voting Incentive
.
He talks about the power of whales, and bots. He basically says all's fair in love and war, the results will be interesting anyway.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
The solution is good, it is feasable
Reputation is based on votes right?
The more votes you get the higher your reputation.
That sounds fine to link your voting power to your reputation to prevent sybil attacks. but there is one small problem with that.
Our first porn star on Steemit got a reputation of 60 in about two days. It took me three months to get that.
One point I'd like to make (and i am possibly quite wrong here).. Steemit is decentralized - it's on decentralized blockchain technology. No-one said that the power has to be equally shared among the users, or that a larger section of users should have more power or that the whales should have less power.
In fact the way this works on Steemit at the moment mimics real life. It's not a fantasy land where everyone is equal and we all get the rewards we thing we deserve.
By all means point out the flaws in the system, suggest ways it can be improved. that's helpful. But let's focus on real issues and not that we think we are missing out because someone has more power, or gets more votes.
if money is your only motivator, then nothing here is going to keep you interested. if your interest is participation in something new, innovative, special that has the potential to earn you some bucks for your hard work down the track, then you are more likely to stay, meet cool people and enjoy yourself.
I know which strategy I'm pursuing.
Note: this it not an attack on you or your views . I'm just over people complaining about Steemit not fitting their own vision of what it should be, instead if working with what we have to make it better.
That's one big issue with @richardcrill 's suggestion.
However, a much, much, much bigger issue, from the platform functionality and power distribution standpoint, is what @timcliff brought up, higher up in the comments section to this post - reputation is easily gamed by high SP accounts.
It costs about $10 to make an account and something like 5 to 10 votes from a "mega whale" (1 million SP +) account to get an account from the initial 25 to 60+ reputation. For only $100 and "spending" 50, or so, votes, a mega whale account owner suddenly gains 10 more accounts of high voting influence, thanks to the reputation loophole that @richardcrill is suggesting.
Before we know it, mega whales with 1 million SP will have 5 million SP influence, due to all the cheap voting power that they can get through churning out these cheap accounts to take advantage of the aforementioned loophole.
I mean, they can have 1,000 accounts for just $10,000.00. What's that to a person that has over $500,000.00 in SP? I'll tell you what, pittance. It's an easy call.
Very good point. Thank you for explaining that so clearly. This is exactly why I asked for feedback from the community. Thank you. It's obvious to me now that it wouldn't be a good idea without making changes to the way that reputation works. I'll have to keep thinking.
Good point. I'm not gonna spam my previously mentioned idea here, but I'd be interested in your take on it.
what I am thinking right now (partly inspired by this post) is: how can we design a system that allows users/accounts to specialized in what they do best: writing (authors), reading (curators), speculating (bots/bot designers/investors) and managing (witness/devs). It is like selecting a profession in a computer game, so everyone/every account can do what they do best (after a certain period of observation) and collectively the system works better.
I know what @mughat would say - substeems
thanks! just check @mughat 's posts. really interesting ideas. it seems much more complicated but also shows the potential to bring Steem to next level.
I wrote a post related to this issue a month ago
https://steemit.com/steemit-ideas/@snowflake/what-if-i-told-you-i-ve-uncovered-a-top-secret-community-this-community-is-so-secretive-that-if-you-want-to-work-your-way-up-its
It's definetely a big problem that needs to be solved asap.
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