This hardfork is about one thing: Improving the rewards curve
While developing Steem Simplicity (0.17.0) we began looking into changing the rewards curve for comments. The primary reason was to distribute rewards more evenly and reduce the unbalancing effect of vote concentration. The initial proposal was well received and we were asked to do the same for posts. We had underestimated the desire for a flatter rewards curve. The solution we initially designed was too complicated and did not meet the community's goals. The curve was scrapped and we decided to postpone the change to give us suitable time to further discuss the implications and choose the right curve.
Linear Rewards
We want to move forward with changing all content rewards to a linear reward curve. This had been suggested by multiple people and through our research we agree that this is the best choice to grow the Steem community into the future.
With the introduction of a linear reward curve everyone will have a say directly proportional to their stake.
Curation Weight Curve
As with past changes to rewards, we must change the curation reward curve in concert. We propose the weight curve be the square root function. Comparisons of curation rewards on existing posts under this new model show a high degree of similarity to current rewards that even slightly favors smaller accounts more than the current weight curve does.
We don't expect many people to see significant differences in their curation rewards using this curve.
Increase Each Vote's Impact
We want to change the voting power reserve rate to allow voters to spend more of their voting power in a single vote. You will be able to concentrate your influence with fewer votes while still being able to spread it out if you choose. Currently, you are limited to using 1/200th of your remaining voting power in a single vote. We want to increase this somewhere between 4-10x per vote.
We are committed to proposing smaller hardforks, and concentrating design and engineering efforts on fewer features that are focused on accomplishing a specific goal for the release. That’s why this hardfork is so much smaller, and we hope to continue this trend going forward.
Have comments? We’d love to hear what you think.
- Vandeberg (@vandeberg) and the Steem Blockchain Devs
Great work. I support this. The community has been asking for a more linear rewards curve for some time, which gives everyone's vote a more equal weight. There has been some disagreement about how best to achieve this, but I think most of us understand it is needed.
In the past, I opposed the higher weight vote change, but I've come around to understanding that it might be better for some people, so I'm open to trying this. As for the curation rewards, I don't have any strong opinion and will leave that to smarter minds. Glad you're going with smaller fork packages from now on, which makes a lot of sense!
I also opposed the higher vote weight change previously but I think this would be very helpful now - particularly as the amount of time I have becomes more limited this will allow me to use up my voting power more efficiently.
That was my first big post talking about prospect theory and how rescuing 40 to 5 would be like a super vote for minnows and great for steem. Ah the memories.
This is a bad idea. A lot more stake will end up being used by users to vote for themselves. Engagement/curation will be discouraged and votes will be more concentrated. We already have enough groups upvoting each other, this is going to make it even worse.
Is there any statistics on what the self-voting percentage is? If not I suggest we calculate it before implementing any new feature. I can guarantee that increasing the power of each vote will increase self-voting a lot in term of the stake used to self-vote.
I also don't like the idea that users who are not active would be able to use all their power without much involvement in the platform. Active users should be able to benefit from users who are inactive and do not use their voting power.
It's not a bad idea. There is much voting power unused by human curators while bots are fully utilizing it. Increasing each vote's impact will reduce the gap between human and bots. If one is doing both manual and bot curation, one may decrease a proportion of bot curation for keeping manual curation power (just my 2 cents)
Active users have no disadvantages compared to bots, but that's not even the problem.
The whole point of steem is to reward others with your voting power, if you make it easier for users to upvote themselves the platform loses value.
I was the first one to say that the curve was a non issue for self voting and that it doesn't prevent self-voting. However this feature to give a single vote more power will definetely encourage self-voting, the fact that it takes a lot of post to use your power is the best protection against self voting.
If you have a blockchain where everyone upvote themselves it becomes worthless and that's what a lot of people will do if this new change is implemented.
I generally agree with you, but have some different thoughts. To explain, I need to refine two points of your statement "the whole point of steem is to reward others with your voting power".
So, in my words, "the point of Steem is to spend community money on contents, which are perceived to potentially generate values for the community, via collaborative decision making process with voting power."
Back to self voting, I think self-voting can be cast if an author evaluates his/her content worth to be rewarded. There is no reason to exclude the author from the evaluation process, since he/she is also a stakeholder of Steem.
However, the problem of superlinearity is when one has very big voting power, which is greater than average upvotes(in VESTS) of all other posts. In this case, the self-voter can earn more than his/her stake shares. Smart bots also follow this large voter while other minnows feel disappointed. Consequently, collaborative decision making process is hindered.
In the linear system, everyone's vote will be treated in equal weights, regardless of being whale or minnow, and this will facilitate collaborative decision making process. There can be some more self upvoters, but I think it is okay if they think their posts are worth to get it. Surely, others can downvote if they think the posts are overvalued.
The key for Steem is collaboration. Equality in vote and weakened bots influence are good move IMHO.
You called it!
Exactly. It fixes the problem everyone has been complaining about or leaving for since the beginning.
Are you sure? I am afraid that there needs to be a bigger and fuller explanation. Does this really suggest that I can vote at 4-10 times standard vote weight or the minimum vote weight is 4-10 times more than it was - ie 1/50th to 1/20th - it does not directly suggest anything over 100%. Imagine a flagging war at 4-10 times power!
When the title of this post says steem equality - what does that mean? Is steem to be included in stake weight along with Steem Power?
Communication, once more, leads us into a valley of doubt.
People leave this platform because of Steemit Inc. and the behaviour of the various lieutenants who patrol about like the Brown Shirts. Their brown noses are the give away.
I think the single biggest problem for retention and minnows leaving is because of not having any influence. This is the first thing I have heard to finally fix this problem. I never thought voting guilds were the ideal solution.
I am afraid that, having done a very great deal of research into this, you might have ben misled. Whales profiteering off the minnows is reason number 1. Treatment of minnows by other people is number 2. Lack of transparency over the way in which things are calculated and the resulting realisation of the extent of the greed is number 3. The blogosphere is a condemning space.
Sorry mate but I have too much data on the platform and the way in which not just the rewards but also the realities behind the system are manipulated. You might be shocked!
I've been paying attention a little bit longer than you, mate.
lol, How is that possible?? Whale votes have historically been the only thing to give profits to whales, minnows, dolphins, etc.
I've already gone over the main reason. The other reason I have seen people leave is flagging from whales or not getting noticed or engaged, which all stems from the power divide. Treatment of minnows by the people has been good. I can think of a whale who has destroyed some minnows but what people are you talking about?
That is what is what they are trying to change with this post!
Sorry mate, I don't know why you've decided to try to argue here, maybe for you the blogosphere is a condemning space., but I don't generally see it that way.
Show me the calculation!! With apologies to Eddie McGuire.
I am getting rather tired.
If I can prove that whales profit off the content of minnows, will you hand over your entire account to me?
Your alternative it to stop defending the childish antics of steemit inc and get this platform functional.
Your call
@ebryans, my gut feel tells the same as you mentions regarding the reasons why the small account are only here from a little while and become inactive quickly. You seem to have data. Great. You may like my opinions and views to the complexity of rewards distribution, read some of them in the comments to this post. I already send you a private message on Discord to see how we can help each other.
I AGREE!
I fully agree! This shall also include the retirement of the first 30 minutes behaviour IMHO.
There is a reason that was added in the first place. Do you have a solution to the problem it is solving?
The reason was to prevent bots from getting all the curation rewards by voting in the first few seconds. However, 30 minutes is extreme. A much shorter period would suffice to limit instant voting by bots without being so intrusive to regular users.
And if we would remove the vote order weight? We can remove the whole 30 minutes then when I understand the reasons correctly. I believe from reading through all sort of posts and the whitepaper the vote order weight was introduced to give extra reward to those who are very active in curating. But don't you think that only a small percentage may be very active, and all the others simply do not have the time to be that active? Could it be that when we have let say 1 million active users, most of them spend some quality time on Steemit creating a post, reading some posts, writing some comments, and casting some votes on whatever they like when reading, and then go and do other things? Steemit has build in a game element by implementing the vote order weight; A pure reward game for a few individuals to try and maximise their curation rewards; The vote order weight does not serve anything else, or is at least not that important to get eg quality content voted for IMHO. The whole service needs to be as simple as it can get for growth. Most of us are not beta people, most of us are creative people, writers, artists etc. In the future maybe Steemit likes to add businesses, from SME's to large enterprises; anything complex, they will not like at all, not the independent grocery store around the corner, not Coca Cola or PPG. Maybe I do not see all ins-and-outs and pro's and con's, but to me, the reverse auction is making things too complex. The vote order weights is making things to complex. The non linear voting curves are too complex. The later is topic of change; What about the other ones?
I think the vote order weight should be a lot smaller. Some bonus for being first is okay, but there's no reason later voters can't get a meaningful share as well.
It's hard to find an Unloved post but it's easy to vote for all the hot and trending posts. I think we should keep some reward.
What would be your proposal for weight curve?
I agree. This comment from an earlier steemitblog post shows why.
That's just a random example that I happened to remember seeing, but I'm sure many other voters employ the same reasoning. How do you accurately rank the popular posts when the curation reward system is discouraging voters from providing that last bit of information?
Maybe something like splitting 50/50, or 80/20, where part of the reward is split evenly among every voter and the other part is weighted according to the order of vote.
The results are also not wanted. To be honest, I do not know all the reasons, since I do not know what information is correct and what is not/obsolete. I only know that with the 30 minutes behaviour, individuals/curators try to game the system which is unwanted as well. My gut feel says also that votes are not casts for new posts because of this rule, to wait before voting and then account holder will actually forget to vote. This harms mostly the large amount of accounts having lesser followers, which are the majority of the accounts.
When making important changes I don't think we should go by gut feeling. The 30 minute behavior is there to prevent gaming the system because without it things were worse. You can use this bookmarklet to control your vote time, you just have to keep the tab open. I agree, it's not ideal, but I do think it's better than the alternative, and we should be careful about changes unless we know the impact they will have and the history behind why things are the way they are in the first place.
Thank you for the bookmarklet, but probably I'll not use it. First of all to clarify my position: I personally do not use bots for voting, since I'm against auto voting. Bot can be used for filtering and such, but IMHO shall be prevented from direct influence on reward distribution. Voting shall be a manual activity. Furthermore, I think that most of the users on Steemit are here to create posts, read posts and vote honestly, ie without any gaming in mind to maximise their own revenues. With this is mind, I do not understand why we do not have a linear curation curve. After spending 30-45 minutes searching Steemit for relevant post to explain the 30 minutes reverse auction, I think I understood correctly the reverse auction was needed because of the non linear curation curve. Why not bringing this back to linear? BTW, why having a curation algorithm that gives more rewards to the first voters? Network effect, the whitepaper describes; but I refer to my first statement above, I do think most of the Steemians will vote for content when they like it in one way or the other. Why not test this in real rather than assuming those things? Also, note that most of us Steemians do not have the time to spend hours and hours per day on Steemit. It is not the tool that will pay our bills so we do not take and have time to start gaming the system. Bot owners likely do, since they are there to maximise their income, maybe not all, but I suspect most of the bot owners have in mind their revenues. When we would argue that time spend needs to be included in reward distribution, I disagree, since this will for sure prevent Steemit to grow to millions of users. I also read somewhere in the whitepaper the whole reward model is based on the short/long tail model, but I do disagree using such model as a reference; Steemit is dominated by bot voters and they do not take quality into account. The whole idea of most rewards go to the short tail of quality posts is based on quality content which is a parameters the bots are not taking into account. Any feature under discussion is part of a larger discussion IMHO. Such larger discussion needs to happen, but does not IMHO. In parallel, I think we shall test a whole set of different algorithms to see what the effects are in the real world of Steemit.
I could never understand the part why the first voters getting more.
Well said @edje ! Good thoughts I mostly agree with.
Spamming threads is not desirable.
This is a very major change to be proposing without a rationale that addresses the reasons for a super-linear curve in the first place.
You mention research. Please answer the 'why?'
I agree to a point. However there have been numerous discussions about it in other posts by steemitblog, abit and others. Agree it would be helpful for steemitblog to summarize in the context of this proposal.
The previous @steemitblog post about making changes to the non-linear reward curve made the case that linear was not a good idea. https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/details-on-proposed-comment-reward-curve
So I'm still waiting to hear why it is.
Good point. I can't speak for the but I can say that the numerous discussions that followed that proposal pointed out various problems with the idea of a modified linear curve. It may be that the problems they were attempting to solve with that approach were not worth the additional problems introduced by it, as well as some problems which even a modified linear curve does not solve (in terms of the latter I would identify influence for smaller stakeholders remaining very small). But I can't speak for them, perhaps they should just explain better.
I totally agree with you @pfunk on this one. I thought it was odd when I saw this announcement without the reason why Steemit inc was previously hesitating to implement a linear reward curve. It's a good thing you asked.
I'm with you. I definitely would want to know all the ramifiactions before making such a large change. A more linear rewards curve sounds good, especially to those of us who aren't big yet. However, I'm wondering if it wouldn't come with unintended consequences. I would love to see the current rewards structure fully explained, and then compared item by item with the proposed new rewards structure.
Currently, voting shares compound on whatever gets voted on. The voting shares on a post or comment are squared with themselves so that the effect is greater than the sum of the individual votes. This has a rationale that is explained in the (now somewhat outdated) white paper. To propose purely linear rewards without stopping to address the reasoning is an oversight.
That would be an oversight. OK, so how much my vote adds to a post is basically the amount it would add (whatever that is) squared. But if I'm remembering my math correctly, the square of an entire sum of numbers isn't the same as the sum of each individual number squared, so I guess there isn't going to be one consistent amount that a given user upvote will add to any post, is there?
With the current reward curve, correct. Your vote could have a $0.01 impact if you vote first on a new post, but if that post reaches $100, the same vote would have a >1 cent impact.
With a linear system, whatever your vote adds to a post won't be static, because there is still the whole reward pool to be distributed according to votes. But it will be much closer to static.
Static is good for tracking purposes, but I see how it could be problematic for other aspects. I hope that all these factors are being looked at closely before making any major changes in the rewards structure. Thanks for the clarification.
Please...one economic change at a time.
I would like to see the rewards curve flattened, but not flat. Let's start with that, and only that, for now. We just had some pretty big changes that did not exactly go well.
Propose one economic change. Analyze the results. Modify it, if needed. Then analyze again and make any adjustments - or scrap it altogether if it doesn't work.
Then, if any other changes are needed, make a new proposal. This is getting to be too much and there's no stability to speak of. Kind of hard to attract investors, developers, and businesses to the blockchain/currency like this.
Yep, like
n^1.1right?Literally anything less than n^2.
As I have stated in other comments, fractional powers are extremely difficult to do using integer math and are expensive operations.
These are not multiple economic changes from our perspective. Switching to a linear curve has some drawbacks which the other parts of the proposal address.
If any one of these three points does not pass consensus we will not ship the hardfork as is and go back to the drawing board. That is not us being stubborn but protecting the blockchain from exploits and threats that exist if they do not get passed.
Well, if you can do square root, you can do n^1.5 easily enough (and I guess n^0.25, etc.). n log n is also implementable without enormous difficulty, I believe (couldn't be wrong, I haven't actually implemented it and worked out all the annoying details).
I don't know what that does to curation rewards though, maybe you addressed in a different comment and I didn't see.
Would it be possible to explain the actual effects of these changes using real number examples? Perhaps before and after examples for 500,000 sp, 50,000 sp, and 5,000 sp?
Here is a break down using the current reward pool.
Single 100% vote reward allocation.
Part of the reason the rewards are higher for the 500,000 SP is that the rewards allocation algorithm responds faster than with n^2. This data is as if we had implemented linear rewards in 0.17.0 and the rewards pool is further recovered. However, you can see the different if you look at marginal percentage changes in the vote weights.
I was on my phone before so I could not respond as thoroughly as I would have liked to. I sincerely appreciate what you are doing here today. Not only did you provide a great explanation to my question, you are doing it for everyone's questions. Every time I think I may have a new question, I scroll through these comments and see that not only did someone already ask it, but you provided an answer that even a layman like me can understand.
Thank you for taking the time to help educate the community about this. Confusion can be an unpleasant feeling and you are doing a lot to remedy that.
Haha, I just experienced that too.
Thank you so much for doing this! This is exactly what I was wondering about.
Currently, we are in "linear" or "n ^ 2"?
n^2. We are proposing linear.
Ha, it's going to attract people if we do.
And it will motivate me.
Yes, would be great to see this - both for vote influence and curation rewards. Though I believe a lot of the benefit will come from the fact that whales will crowd out the reward pool less, rather than purely the distribution on a single post.
Correct although the current pool already removes most of the effect of whale crowding out because of voluntarily-limited whale voting (and a small amount of countervoting). However doing it directly via the formula is more sustainable and transparent.
Yes that's he best reason to do it. It will not only counteract whales but dolphins too
Oh, yes that would be very helpful to see it in black and white like that!
Please write a long explanation as to why the reward was superlinear in the first place then explain why pure linear now so much better, otherwise it seems like you have absolutely no idea of what you are or were doing.
You were supposed to make a ton of research and simulation to decide on what curve to chose instead of a slightly more linear curve in HF17. Where is that research? What are the results?
I am rather new to Steem and understand the numerous benefits of a superlinear curve. I think this post need a bit more of "WE WERE TOTALLY WRONG" and "here's why".
We don't believe we were wrong with super-linear rewards, we simply underestimated the wealth gap that was caused during hyper inflation. If you had mined just one proof of work in the first month of Steem then you would have 21 mv today. That's over 10,000 SP. For a single proof of work. Hyperinflation meant that those accounts that used their stake and earned on it quickly outpaced everyone else. If the difference between between whales and minnows was closer to the difference between dolphins and minnows or even less, we probably wouldn't be having the discussion today. While there is some controversy, we have seen many positive comments regarding the whale experiment (which is how Steem might have looked if we did not have hyperinflation). We are dedicated to doing what is right for the platform that we do have, not the one we might have had.
Dan
With linear curve, there will be no incentive, to actually have only 1 account. IMO bots will flood whole network. With so many bots, number of votes will become totally irrelevant and misleading in UI.
We should have more flatten curve (like
n*log(n)), but not totally flat.Votes are already extremely misleading in the UI and should be removed in favor of some sort of score or other UI to give a more meaningful indication of voter support. For that matter, even sites with no rewards have seen bots used to inflate voting for misleading purposes. As long as it is displayed it will be abused.
I think most of the post are voted for by bots already. So many posts I see with lots and lots of votes, but only a few views. Even post from Dolphins with hundreds of votes may have only a couple of 10s views.
There no incentive to have a single account today. It is the total of all the votes on a post that get squared, not the individual votes.
(v1 + v2 +v3)^2 != v1^2 + v2^2 + v3^2A single account only makes management easier but with vote following bots, it isn't too bad.
I agree with potential bot-fraud becoming a serious and large issue. However, I am unsure that incentive curves can fully stop it. Right now I'd guess the Flagging system + the heavily weighted incentive curve doesn't make it worthwhile?
IMO a better solution would be to try to find a way to link voting to actual attention and enjoyment as opposed to just a "click-to-vote." What Brave is doing with their BAT is interesting in that realm: https://steemit.com/blockchain/@hellhen/a-blockchain-based-online-advertising-system. Could also address issues with autovoting, voting blocs, etc.
Well said. The closer we get to 1 vote = 1 person, the more "social" this "social network" can actually be.
that would be true, if you would have a way to eliminate bots. When you are a new users and you receive 60 upvotes and only 10 views and 0 comments... you are asking question what is going on with this "social network"?
Make a minimal balance or "ante" then people would have to buy more steem inorder to have more bots. A minimal balance to upvote and post would get rid of alot of ghost accounts on steemit. Although people might turn right away from a site they have to "buy into" no matter how small the amount is... Hmmm...
Question is: what is "new"? I think most people who came to this platform in the last 4 to 6 months have mostly such vote/view ratios as you mentions.
I am waiting patiently for that day !
Are there any backtest simulations on worst case scenarios? It was suggested that a good econometrician should be involved.. Just mentioning this since the numbers are important and Steemit's initial hyperinflation problem and some of the other debilitating parameter settings (like the recent pool regeneration) could've been avoided if there's someone with experience on econometrics on the team. But maybe this is best run and tested live - what are some of the plans on measuring performance or whatever important stuff that should be measured?
Backtesting doesn't really work for this where user behavior, both by design and in practice, responds to the incentives offered by the rule set. Looking at past behavior under a different proposed rule set just produces misleading results.
The only way to get meaningful results is to put it into practice and see how users (not even merely existing users but also new ones) respond to it. Which is a key reason why it is so important to make only a few changes at a time, as steemitblog states in the post (and I support 100%)
Agreed! Please spend some time simulating the blockchain through the various proposals and reporting on the results or maybe commission someone in the community to do that analysis for you. Changes to the reward system is a really big deal since that's the main thing which separates this platform form any other. As mentioned here in the comments, we should work hard to explain the "why" behind the existing system (pros and cons) and the "why" behind the changes. What are the risks and what are the benefits? Will the "lottery" style of Steemit where you don't really know what your rewards are going to be go away and is that what we want?
We had done some backtesting, but I am getting a new data set as we speak using the most up-to-date live chain state.
Fantastic! I think many of us would love to see this data when talking about proposed changes. Data-driven decisions are good decisions! :)
I'm one of those who hope this data will be made public. Thank you @vandeberg for all the awesome work you done for Steem!
Question: How long does it take before the changes occur after the HF date? The next block? i.e near instantly?
PLEASE CLARIFY WHAT YOU MEAN BY "COMMENTS"
I am not joking. In steem code every post and comment are called a "comment" (technically speaking a main post is a comment without a parent).
This naming convention was a reason of confusion during last hardfork.
By reading release notes from last hardfork:
A lot of people really thought that this will going to be only about comments (replies), not main posts.
In the code both posts and comments are treated as 'comments'. Posts are 'comments' that don't have a parent. That is the source of the confusion, but I agree with you that the presentation should be more clear.
In this context, it is being used as non-post comments (replies).
I agree - it can be a bit confusing at times :)
We are sorry for the confusion. The intent of this is all content (posts and replies).
Why not:
n^<witness-parameter>I like that
BitShares allows parameters like fees to be controlled by witnesses, yes? I wonder if we could do something similar here.
There are technical difficulties associated with this approach that would require a significant rework to the rewards code. Not to mention the difficulty in calculating fractional exponents using integer math. We cannot use floating point numbers because they are notoriously nondeterministic and have no place in a blockchain. (I am assuming the exponent would be in the range [1,2]).
Hahah. I want this on a T-Shirt. :)
Haha, me too :)
LOL, me three!
Did you ever get this t-shirt?!
I'm enjoying reading back though the comments here today - behind my hands at times!
Sounds like if we went that route, it would take a really long time to implement.
Does this mean that it would be tough to do any fractional exponent or just that it would be difficult to repeatedly change the exponent according to witness votes?
Any fractional exponent. Keeping the numbers from overflowing is difficult as well. n^5/8 would be n^5 * n^1/8. Raising to the 5th power would require a 512 bit integer and then we would have to implement 1/4 as three square roots. (For the devs out there, we have created a deterministic square root algorithm that is quite fast). We would need dynamic big ints to prevent overflow from strange powers.
Thank you very much. I hate when my numbers overflow!
(Kidding! I really do appreciate you taking the time to help me understand this stuff.)
I really like this approach.
Awesome idea
My instinct is that a linear curve would be a very good change.
If consensus is difficult to achieve we can move it down slowly over time, but my guess is that the support for this change would be there.
A few example numbers here with respect to changes in both voting power and curation rewards depending on hypothetical Steem Power levels would serve as a good reference point.
Please test the changes to make sure there aren't any unforeseeable consequences.
Neutral on the optional more impact per vote feature. Any particular reason for this?
It lets people who are more time limited use up there voting power more efficiently and also allows a lot more nuance with the voting slider. Those who want to retain the old per vote levels can just set their slider lower.
ya I suppose if it's linear it'll be pretty difficult to abuse in any way
no reason not to support more control over how you use your voting power
pretty happy with these changes overall, steem is still small enough that we can make these big changes, and this curve is definitely a change for the better
I agree on the more impact per vote. I don't always have the time that I used to have and would love to use all of my voting power voting for 5 or 10 posts a day instead of have it sitting there unused.
can someone ELI5 the impact and changes due to this?
Nice! I'd love to have the option for fewer but higher powered votes for special occasions , and I'm also keen to experiment and see what happens with a linear reward curve :)
Is there an ETA on this next HF yet ?
This sounds like a great idea in theory. I love the idea of changing the rewards curve and I really love the idea of smaller forks with only a couple changes in each one.
Though won't people mostly just vote for themselves???
In the past, there have been a number of Forks where I liked some of the changes and disliked some of the others, which made it difficult to either vote for or against said Fork. This makes things much easier! Thanks!
smaller forks with small changes is an ideal situation!
My vote does not reflect my stance on this issue.
Why flag a payout declined post?
@berniesanders, I would be most interested to read your stance on ALL issues. You may well have written many of your ideas before now - some may have been missed by many people and some of your ideas may have changed through the implementation of new protocols as imposed by Steemit Inc.
Your influence is not only a resonating force, but it is an important and powerful force.
Your full range of ideas would be most welcome by someone like me who does actually analyse what is going on and can see the potential impacts for good, bad and indifferent. I am by no means alone in this.
As ever, I offer up my research to anyone interested in what it reveals.
At present, I would suggest that the balances of steem in trading accounts - Poloniex and Bittrex being the stand-outs - are of concern. Poloniex represents over 10% of all the value of steem/SP at present. The recent surge from 15/16 cents to 20+ cents seemed to coincide very sweetly with the 1.2million of steem which looks like a steemit account sale.
There are people in steemia who are not stupid!
A Brighter future seems to be eluding everyone via intransigence.
I do hope that you see fit to express your true sentiments.
Collaboration is the way forward.
My full support with this proposal (All of them!)
I'm 100% in support as well. It should be an extremely positive change. Thanks @clayop, @abit, @ned, @vandeberg and all the others that have been advocating for this and helping to push this forward. We should see a significant rise in engagement and retention.
This seems like a step in the right direction. However, and I realize this might ruffle some feathers, how come it's coming from Steemit?
What I mean is, this is a Steem blockchain change. It's not a Steemit platform change, right? This is the Steemit blog account. This post is about the Steem blockchain.
Wasn't this separation supposed to be a major factor in pushing the blockchain forward? Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it appears that the two remain one, for all practical purposes. Wouldn't it take Steem leaps further to get more folks involved with the blockchain through a decentralized process rather than continuing on this same course? Then these decisions would be promoted by a core set of developers focused on the blockchain rather than a group who's in charge of the Steemit UI and marketing.
We're ready. Let's get more Steemboats in the water and decentralize this baby!
Now that steemd is open source, if the witnesses and major stakeholders want to take the network in another direction, they have a viable means to do so.
I have no problem with Steemit Inc taking charge of development, it is only important that it be viable to fork away if their interests and policy diverge from the stakeholders. I don't see that happening for some time.
The problem is more related to them painting a picture of separation and the ability to integrate via API and not following through well. The separation that was discussed in the road map has not materialized. That's fine. We're still on the road. But it would be nice if it was a priority. The documentation for the API, from what I understand (not being a dev), does not deliver on the promises. Integrating another UI with full functionality remains elusive for devs.
The owners of steemit inc own the steem blockchain - yes, it is unhealthy. All HFs come from steemit inc and are voted on by the witnesses - the conflict of interest is blatant. Few seem to gather the relevance.
The decentralisation is going to APPEAR to happen via the decentralisation of ownership to multiple accounts which will cost 1 steem each to set up. With a flatter rewards calculation, the holding of SP in one account loses its commercial leverage. Hence, if you see the massive number of recent new accounts, you will soon see the delegation or transfer of power being decentralised but actually ... not decentralised at all.
Were there a one account per person protocol (normal in social media as we are each one person), we would have a better, healthier platform.
The fact that whales have been profiteering off other people's content has been exposed. The HFs seem to be seeking to disguise this sad truth and they seem intent on enjoying this usury for as long as they can.
The really sad thing is that were these paragons of virtue able to see that were there to be REAL decentralisation, their 100,000 SP, if reduced to say 30,000 SP with a concurrent influx of subscribers to say 50,000 from the current +/- 2,500, their account value would be about 5 times what it currently is (i.e. a 15 times multiple steem value).
When you wear blinkers and choose not to see, 'wilful ignorance' is the term which should be applied!
Steemit is sponsoring all of the development of the Steem Blockchain for the moment, and all development for the blockchain is coordinated by us in concert with the community and the growth and development plans for the Steem Platform (including its flagship application steemit.com).
Quite the opposite. Design by committee is doomed. I encourage you to review our roadmap: https://steem.io/2017roadmap.pdf
I've read it more than once... just the other day in fact. It points out that there will be greater separation between Steemit and Steem.
Releasing the license is a good step. It'll free up greater development.
It may seem minor but I think it would be wiser to do one thing at a time. Increasing per-vote power is directly related with the reward curve (if there will be any curve) and doing both at once would be turning two knobs on the same thing and expecting a useful experimental measurement.
Personally I'm not convinced linear is the way to go but as I asked in my other comment, I'd like to hear the "why" part first before getting into that.
The reason we are choosing to do both at the same time is to help human users a little bit against bots. A reservation with linear rewards is that bots will self vote their maximal voting power and humans will continue to use the site as they have and potentially not use all of their voting power. In this scenario bots will get rewarded at a faster rate then their stake. We want human users to be able to use their voting power a little quicker to help curb that effect. We gave a range of values from a small bump to a large bump and appreciate all conversations discussing the merits of those changes.
This is fine, but make sure your thresholds adequately distinguish between bots and humans. There are many regular curators and curation guilds that can make up to 100 manual votes a day. These are all human votes, though it may not seem like it. These curators keep the site running efficiently, and it'd be in the community's best interest to keep them engaged.
That's always been the issue with reducing the vote target (equivalent to the proposed idea of increasing vote strength). It reduces the relative influence of more engaged users. With 10x it means someone can sign in for five minutes, make 4 votes, and have the same aggregate influence as someone who is voting all day and makes 100. That's why I've never supported this idea, at least not to any sort of extremes.
Bots are inherent in any system of this architecture and can be both good and bad. The devs really need to stop this futile crusade against 'bots' (futile to the extent it is based on simple parameter tweaks), at a minimum to the extent that it has side effects that cause negative (presumably unintended) consequences for humans.
A better idea that at least deferentially targets bots would be to introduce acceleration into the recharge rate so humans (who work, sleep, etc.) would recharge fully but bots trying to vote 24h/day would not.
I like that idea.
Bots can take a break as well..
Of course, but then they lose their big advantage of working 24h/day. The idea isn't to get rid of bots but to blunt their advantages (if you think that is important anyway, I'm not sure I do).
To close that gap entirely, the expectation of rewards at the time of voting should be based on an algorithm which is not computable or estimatable/predictable by a bot or in which all choices produce the same estimate.
If the said estimation and the maximization of it also motivate the human voter to interact online, then that other desirable goal of maximum real human usage is simultaneously met.
Afaik, the uncertainty in the curation reward marginally adheres to the former requirement but it is difficult for users to estimate and doesn’t (maximally) motivate the said goal. Steem’s rewards are much too complex (and much more complex than they need to be) which is one of the reasons why users leave.
I'm on board with that slider option.
I'm not onboard with the curve change, for the reasons stated above.
The community has been discussing this for months now. I don't think there's any issue that been more widely supported. There's been disagreement about exactly what formula to use, but this is a big step forward. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
for months now. I don't think there's any issue that been more widely supported
for months now. I don't think there's any issue that been more widely supported
for months now. I don't think there's any issue that been more widely supported
for months now. I don't think there's any issue that been more widely supported
for months now. I don't think there's any issue that been more widely supported
for months now. I don't think there's any issue that been more widely supported
for months now. I don't think there's any issue that been more widely supported
for months now. I don't think there's any issue that been more widely supported
for months now. I don't think there's any issue that been more widely supported
for months now. I don't think there's any issue that been more widely supported
I haven't seen consensus for a switch to linear rewards. Some have supported it, some have supported less-exponential curves.
I have supported less exponential, but not completely linear. But are you referring to the 4x to 10x power vote here?
Yeah, I figure @donkeypong is talking about the reward curve when he says formula. Correct me if I'm wrong.
I think the agreement is on change of the status quo, not on how.
IF the experiment is lowered to 400mv, ~9600usd, I bet the newbs respond.
It can be raised as a function of market cap.
I'm with you on more discussions, decrees from on high chap my hide.
I don't oppose that slider option.
So what's the bottom line in everyday language, will payouts go back up to at least where they were or goes down further?
Will new people be able to come on and make money right away or have to build up following of 1000+ people first by posting for month with little to no rewards?
Let's not forget many people came here because of the huge payouts when those were possible. Without the ability to actually make money right away, this is not going be viral and attract massive numbers of users quickly...
Because let's not forget, since we on only get paid on a post once (a horrible model) all of the posts that a new person post while building up a following will make little to no money and can they don't produce income after a week so it can't be justified as building up a library of posts that will in the future bring in income like you can with youtube video or other sites that offer ongoing payouts. Therefore it's not motivating to the new user.
Also when the payouts are this low as they are now it's hard to even see it as or investing in steem power even as the payouts are so low it hardly makes any difference at all for many new people.
For Steemit to survive and thrive it needs Quality Content Creators and Constant Growth and new blood.
In all of this you need to understand that in the back of everyone's mind in all situations is "What's in it for me?" does not matter if it's business, dating, relationships, even doing charity. The question is always being asked consciously or subconsciously.
I'd say in this fork you need to also add continuous payouts and a direct tipping button (don't know if it would be used much, but it's certain a selling feature and a way for people to make money that don't have a big following or follower with a lot of SP.)
These entries never really give a straight answer to the question that's on everyone's mind, but they're too afraid to ask because it's taboo here: "Will I make more or less money?"
Some examples and bottom lines would be nice.
The payouts being temporarily (though for an extended period) depressed is due to a mistake in the last fork. This proposed change will indirectly help it recover faster. In reality since the STEEM price is up the rewards should be larger than before, except for that bug (and will be when they eventually recover, assuming STEEM price has not dropped).
Linear rewards is the best answer to our problems.
Excellent! Aside of the mentioned change I really love the Agile release approach you are proposing and think this will benefit the overall steemit.com development (implement smaller changes frequently if needed).
I am a big fan of this flexibility and hope that people recognise that this alone is a sign that Steemit.com is lead by openminded, forward thinking developers.
Finally!!! This is what we have all been waiting for! I am loving all this steemit news. This is how I was approaching the problem a few months ago, but a flatter reward curve may be the best solution to the biggest problem steemit has always had!
Awesome news. I was especially excited to read...
That will make it a lot easier to see a direct correlation between changes and outcomes. With so many changes per hard fork that become difficult to know with a certainty.
We agree. The fewer changes at a time, the easier it is to draw accurate conclusions about the changes.
I'm confused about the way it is now, especially the part that says we can only currently use 1/200th of our remaining vote strength in a single vote. What exactly do you mean by that? I thought we got 40 votes a day and that strength was based on whether or not we used the slider. I personally want to give each and every post (including this comment) a full strength upvote because I really only have time to upvote around 40 things a day on Steemit.
Other than that, I do like the sound of this. I want people who have invested into Steem to continue to be rewarded for that, but I think it might have been too much, like where if you have 100X the SP that I do, but have 10,000X the influence. I'd like to see it more linear in that sense. I'd also like to see it clearly delineated somewhere. I'd like to know, for example, exactly how much Steem, SP, and SD, my vote is adding to someone's post at any given time. I'd like to be able to track that and watch it increase as I acquire more SP (influence).
Your account has voting power as a percentage, 0-100%. When you vote, you consume a percentage of the voting power. The delta is consumed and is used to determine the exact number of shares you give to content (Those shares are then used to determine the actual reward at the time of payout, but more shares means more rewards). Currently this is tuned such that voting 40 times in a day breaks even with how quickly your voting power regenerates. Voting power will regenerate from 0% to 100% over 5 days. 40 votes a day over 5 days means that you use 1/200th of your voting power (or 0.5%). That all assumes you only do 100% weight votes. The actual consumed voting power can be less if you do not vote 100%. In which case it will be harder to vote down to the regeneration breakpoint. For every second that you are at 100% voting power and not voting, the regenerated voting power is effectively lost.
The proposed change will allow you to use more of your voting power in a single vote so that it is easier to reach the breakpoint and fewer users will have wasted voting power.
The voting algorithm applies
used_powerboth to the value rewarded and the draw-down fromcurrent_power.Thus the total value which can be rewarded from any level of voting power is always the same for an equal sized section of the voting power drawn-down.
If we set
a₁to the value of a 100% vote andrto the factor that the voting power decreases for each 100% vote, then the total value of the maximum possible votes in rapid succession before any regeneration of voting power is an infinite geometric series:Thus if
a₁is 100% of its value andris 0.98, then total value of maximum possible votes is 50 times its value for a 100% vote. And ifa₁is 80% of its value then total value of maximum possible votes is 40 times its value for a 100% vote. And ditto fora₁at 60%, 40%, 20% of its value then total value of maximum possible votes is 30, 20, 10 times its value for a 100% vote respectively. Thus we can see any sectioning of the voting power provides equal total value. This is because more votes can be made at the lower voting power levels because the voting power decreases slower.I'm not sure if it's a good idea to allow users to use "mega"vote, it will increase self voting a lot and could be a really bad combination with a linear curve. The feature will make it easier for selfvoters to hide.
Please consider all the implications, i personally think it is risky.
I actually think a "mega" vote makes it less likely self-voters would hide. When we consider attacks such as these we often ask ourselves what we would do to pull it off.
So, what would I do to pull off a self voting attack with linear rewards? I would make sock puppets that would post and vote on each other. I would post a lot so that I could spread out my stake without the posts ever getting paid enough to draw attention. I would never want to have large payouts but I would slowly siphon off the reward fund. Frankly, I wouldn't care how large someone's vote would be because I would probably not vote with full weight anyways.
If you have an attack that does rely on larger votes, I am eager to hear it!
The attack is to sign on for five minutes, make your 4 votes, and then sign off. In doing so you parasitically dilute the contribution of those who actually care enough to participate more meaningfully.
This comment has been very enlightening.
Currently if an author wants to give all power to himself he will have to selfvote 200+ posts per day but with the "mega vote" anyone can just write a few posts and give 100% of the power to himself. It's going to be more visible but it's also going to be a lot more legitimate and easy to upvote yourself.
Why would someone upvote other people when he can write just a few posts and give all the money to himself instead? The only thing that would prevent this behavior is curation rewards unfortunately most users don't care about curation rewards.
But this is visible and will likely be downvoted. Smaller payouts on more posts is not as visible and less likely to be the target of downvotes.
While I am a fan of letting people increase the % power of their votes, I do see @someonewhoisme 's point.
You say it will be more visible and likely downvoted... but by who? Who is going to police how often people are posting/upvoting themselves and decide how much is too much?
If a medium sized person were to use all their voting power to only vote for their own posts, minnow flags would have no effect and you would have to find people with larger stakes and convince them to use a similarly large portion of their voting power to cancel it out.
If only they had listened...
OK, so what I'm reading is that the way Steemit calculations work, it's more accurate to think of my voting pool as that I get 200 votes in a period of five days (which of course averages to 40 a day). So in that case, if I know that I'm going to take a few days off, it would make sense for me to vote 40 votes for each of those days ahead of the break (not after it) in order to fully use my votes. So theoretically, I could vote 200 times (full strength) on a Monday, and that would cover all my voting all the way through Friday. Then I'd have to wait until Saturday to start all over with the next 200 votes?
If I understand that part correctly, then I would propose to base it on seven days, not five days, because most of us think in terms of weeks. So, allow a user 280 votes over seven days, and if the user wants to use all the votes up on Monday, then they are depleted until the following Monday when 100% returns.
Another way to look at it is if I decide to take a couple days off voting on weekends, I could set my 40 votes on Friday to be worth three times as much so that I don't have to vote 120 times to actually use up all my power, but could use up the same amount with just the 40 votes. This would be ideal for me because after several weeks of tracking my voting habits I recognize that by the time I've hit 40 votes I'm done in terms of both time and mental resources. So yes, I would love to be able to double or triple my normal voting strength on days when I know that I will be taking the next few days off. So if this is in the works, I'm all for it.
Thanks so much for taking the time to explain it to me.
Just to make sure I comprehend correctly -- are you implying the following:
After "mega-upvoting", at full-weight, it would take a total of 5 days to regenerate all voting power?
Mega-flags will also exist? (This might be dangerous)
We are not proposing allowing use of all your voting power at once, but more than you currently can. And yes, downvotes can be larger as well. But following the principles that currently exist, they must be larger or else you cannot counter users that are using the larger upvote.
40 votes a day is the optimum, as your voting power fully recovers withing 24 hours then. It is possible to vote 200 times until the voting power is down to 0, it then requires 5 days to recover.
The proposed change is beneficial for those who vote less than 40 times. They can multiply the impact of their fewer votes then.
The issue about linear rewards is that it doesn't incentivize power concentration into single accounts. It would be possible to spread it over a lot of sockpuppets without losing influence.
It's to be figured out how serious that issue would be...
Power is already distributed over multiple accounts by various individuals, so the non linear curve didn't really support the idea of a single account per individual. If that is indeed the only reason for a non linear curve, we shall go immediately to linear. I find it very very strange accounts with high SP have super Powers over smaller accounts; That concentrates even more power at the top creating a power structure very similar to the real world, meaning: only a few have almost all power in their hands creating a very out of balance community.
There would be a lot of sockpuppet accounts created especially if the amount of rewards tied to a single vote was ever curtailed as I've seen it proposed. If some whales take it on themselves to downvote posts because they believed another whale rewarded it too much, then that too would lead to the creation of multiple sockpuppet accounts whose votes just followed the main account. So, maybe don't make the rewards curve entirely linear so as to keep in place the incentive to keep a single account. Honestly, I could live with just about any rewards structure as long as I knew what to expect and I could track how my influence was growing day to day. Is there any possibility that a column on how much of each (SD, Steem, SP) gets added to a post when the user upvotes it (on full strength) could be added to Steemwhales.com?
A way to discourage spreading stake is to make vesting rewards (slightly?) superlinear. It doesn't need to be done with the voting rules at all.
Good idea. I didn't even realize we still had that no that inflation is lower.
I like smooth's idea. And yeah, the "interest rate" was forgotten but it has been more visible now with the introduction of claiming rewards. It's easy to see the passive growth of SP by not claiming rewards for a day or two and seeing your balance increase by vesting interest alone.
Interesting idea. But I didn't get a easy way to implement this.
Maybe something like SBD interest where you have to touch the account to get credited with the extra VESTS?
BTW, it is Dan's idea. He suggested it as a future fix on the call when the reward curve was changed to remove the concentration incentive. Did not mean to take credit.
Yes, that's possible. Then the inflation calculation need to change a bit.
A side effect of this, is that people will be encouraged to group up and share bigger accounts, to earn more interest, like Dash Masternode crowdfunding. I don't think it's a very good thing.
Good point.
I agree with all the changes. Nice to see you guys are actually listening to and communicating with the community
delete flagging.
That's a steemit.com front end issue. There's been a code change to do just that sitting for a while without being implemented. I'd like to see it happen too: https://github.com/steemit/condenser/pull/1270
Not sure why this has been sitting around in limbo for 3 weeks... Seems like a no-brainer to me. Hopefully small changes like this will result in greater acceptance of downvotes (and less butthurt).
ah..so it's NOT the blockchain.
how interesting..
Downvotes will always be on the blockchain. But the use of "flag" is just a misnomer on steemit.com.
the part that I have a problem with is the ability to disproportionately damage someone by flagging.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@igster/introduce-downvoting-as-a-way-to-curate-post-rewards-down-and-keep-flagging-to-discourage-malicious-activity what is your opinion on introducing downvote to steemit?
My opinion is that a downvote is fine..as long as it can not do any damage to the person who wrote the post.
Expressing your displeasure with what someone says is freedom of speak and should be encouraged.
Trashing his rewards is assault.
For example...suppose I make a comment on a post that I do not like..
Then the person who wrote the post flags me.
He's damaging MY reputation because I had the temerity to disagree.
We all know of certain cetaceans who do that.
Flaggin has a chilling effect on speech.
If you mean reputation that is an issue with the reputation system and the front end's methods of reacting to account reputations.
"Have comments? We’d love to hear what you think."
OMG. It's about f**king time.
THANK YOU!
You're welcome! :)
"If you don't ask, you don't get!", the community asked and it will be delivered, great news, I look forward to updating my witness with this upcoming HF version, I see the Steem price has already positively increased.
Awesome. Agree with both proposal. I would like to increase my voting power x10 per single vote.
In full agreement about the linear rewards. Also, the rapid development cycle. To be fair, we are nearly there!
Why not a linear curation rewards curve? If you really want things to be simple and equal, what's the problem there? "Equality" doesn't mean an overwhelming majority of curation rewards go to the few whales. "Slightly favors small accounts" isn't enough. It needs to be equal.
Note - don't compare it to the current system, compare it to what a linear rewards curve would look like.
Need more clarity. Am I right in assuming those who vote 40 times a day will not see a difference? Whereas those who vote 5 times a day would see an increase in influence? That's fine, and incentivizes casual curators. As long as this does not also penalize regular curators who really keep the site organized. I sure hope this is not HF15 and target votes changed to 5.
A linear curation reward curve would remove all incentive to vote on good content (for the purpose of curation rewards). If your vote is linear then it will increase the payout of a post by the same amount no matter how many or few votes the post has. Then, your weight compared to others for curation rewards is also linear. The result is 25% of your vote always goes in your pocket no matter what you vote on. Incentives for curating content go away. We compared it to today's curation rewards because we believe they are in a pretty good place and want to keep them as close as possible to how they work today. The mechanism may be slightly different, but the result should be the same.
Thank you for your clarification. It makes sense to me now. Terrific work replying to all concerns and comments here, by the way. Keep it up!
Fully agree, you are doing a great job here @vandeberg ! Thanks!
Now many people just vote on stuff because they expect many others to vote on it as well, for example because an article is written by a "famous" author who always receives many votes. That means the voting process often is more about speculating what others may vote for, instead just to vote because one really likes an article.
If one would receive the same reward for every of ones votes, then only people would start to vote for stuff they really like.
I intentionally try to vote for articles with only a few votes, if I feel they are good, even if I know my reward will be smaller then.
No, a linear curation reward curve would kill one of the main ideas that I have about Steemit. Which is to surface undervalued content and getting rewarded for this effort. If the curation reward is just a static increment, then there is absolutely no incentive to search for anything yet undiscovered.
I see that differently (probably also because I earn more by writing articles instead of rewarding them). I believe you that sometimes you really get rewarded by discovering undiscovered stuff (I know that you are a very good curator), but I think often curating is more about to reward stuff of famous authors at the right time.
Of course there are curators like you who seek "hidden" stuff, but I have to disagree that articles are "good" only because they have many votes as @vandeberg wrote. I can conclude that also from my own articles where I often have more than hundred votes but only lets say 15 views. How can the 90 % of voters, who didn't even read my article, decide if it is good or bad?
Another example: let two persons, one of them being a "famous old" member, and the other one an unknown "minnow", write exactly the same article: you will see that the well known user has many votes within a very short time, whereas the unknown user has only a few votes within a long timespan. I will bet on that.
This observation is correct and it´s exactly the reason, why reward-oriented curation tries to spot content from unknown users. Trust me, try to maximize your return on curation for a while (if you can afford spending the time that this requires…) and one of the first things you will stop doing is voting on high-rep authors. As you say, the usual suspects of the trending page collect rewards so early after posting that there is simply no window of opportunity for performance oriented curators. Therefore I say, incentivizing content discovery actually counteracts on this kind of inequity that you find faulty here.
Thanks for your interesting thoughts!
Don't you think that most of the people will be honest voters, vote for posts and comments they like of think deserves a vote? 25% curation rewards in my pocket? Well most of the time not, not even in the situation when we would have linear curves. Days I do not spend any minute on Steemit do not get votes from me since I do object vote bots and I truly believe we shall think of something to prevent auto voters. Those days I will not get any rewards. Most other days when I spend lota of time on Steemit, I try and create interesting posts, read other peoples posts, comment and even get into conversations. And while doing so, I casts votes for those posts and comments I like. Don't you think most of the people will actually do that? The rewards are in the posts anyway, compared to curating. Even a superman curator can only earn cents. Only whales can earn much more than cents, but that requires an investments of several 100k US$. I know better ways of investing to get to returns. I call for testing linear curation curves in practise since otherwise we are assuming!
The proposed curation rewards curve change is to preserve the current behavior. You are actually proposing we change even more. We are trying to eliminate hardforks that change too many variables at once.
I agree fully with implementing limited changes to each HF to be able to get better live test results. If not for this HF, plan it for next HF.
That doubletalk (akin to the spin used by marketers who prefer to give a 'discount' to some customers instead of charging the rest extra). Influence is absolutely the most zero-sum thing in the entire system. If you give more influence to some, it means less to others.
In fact that is exactly what is being proposed. They're using different words to try to spin it.
Very Cool, I like the changes to the rewards. When does hard fork 19 take place?
We released this proposal while we finish up 0.18.X (bug fixes and non hardforking changes). Once we have reached a general consensus as a community regarding Steem Equality we will begin the implementation followed by QA/testing and finally a release. We are excited to get this out, but will take whatever time we need to make sure it is done correctly. We will choose a hardfork date when we make the final release.
Great improvement of the communication and discussion process. I can't wait to hear the conversations about this.
I support a flatter curve.
Yep
I'm not a econometrics person, I'm horrible at math! But I'm very eager to see what happens with the flattened linear rewards model....this beta tester is ready for the good, bad, and the ugly.
Sweet. I really think if new users see that their vote matters, even if it is a cent or two and that there is a difference between 100 SP, 1000 SP and 10,000 SP you will see a lot of people put the work in to build their pages. In this era of fake news and internet scams, a lot of people need to see results.
There has to be something that can be done to look back at the chain's history, run the new algorithm, and see what the effect would have been over the last 3 or 4 months.
I bet you will discover the best path to take, but not only that, discover where abuses in the system (like botnets who all vote for the same poster) won't win more than they do already.
A lot of times, it seems that the best way to change these things, is to predict their outcomes. I wouldn't do that... The whole point of historical transactions is to be able to run new algorithms through history and see how it fairs.
That would be the best way of making your decision.
We can do that to simulate what rewards would be but it can never simulate changes in user behavior.
It can't, that's true. But what it could also do, is give also an idea of what type of reverse-engineering people might do with the new system, and consider what they might try to do to over compensate for the change to game the improved reward system.
The initial work to simulate things and notice patterns, trends, and possible "reward exploits" could be possible by using historical data and user patterns.
As time goes on, and since money and value is at stake, doing simulations is going to be mandatory in order to minimize any possible damage that could arise. We don't want to make buying/holding steem a roller coaster ride for investors everytime there is a hard fork. Or do we? :)
Stability with our changes and the value of STEEM, and minimizing problems needs to always be key. So if we can create tools to snapshot historical transactions and run them through algorithms, we should be doing that..
It would yield a lot of interesting data. I can think of about 50 steemit accounts that I'd be checking on, everything from a minnow, dolphin, whale, or bot for the new system. It would be interesting to see how the historical transactions run through the new reward calculation would work for / against them. :)
P.S. There are some bots, who have a nice hefty stake already (like 15,000 SP or more per node), so stake alone isn't a factor. I think reputation "IS" a factor that is hard to earn by bots.. Reputation should be a factor in the payout system. (But that opens a whole different can of worms -- but you never know)
HARDFORK & PRAY
Thank you. This will be a big improvement in my opinion :)
Keep the rewards curve, lower the upper limit to 400mv(~9600usd) wait for the masses to up the market cap, fluctuate the upper limit contingent on market cap.
It seems to me that at some market cap the inflation will be such as to support super linear voting.
Am I wrong in this assumption?
We cannot put an upper limit on SP because whales will split their stake across multiple accounts and vote from each of them. The results are the same as they are today.
I appreciate the fforts of the steemit team and appreciate the comments in this post.
However. I do not care because I revieve such little rewards from simple or long posts unless i write about blockchain stuff. I suggest steemit not try to court everyone and just focus on blockchaon blogging.
I dont care because even trying to leave a comment here, esteem freezes. And steemit site is still ten years behind other sites usability. Usability is more important. You want to woo new users, focus on usability not rewards.
Reality is nobody cares about blockchain. Nobody cares about bitcoin. People care about their families, paying bills, health. People want easy. If you are more interested in rewards and github, then for your own sake, give up on trying to appeal to masses, focus on those already here and reach out to banks, financial institutions, entrepreneur hubs.
Wow this is a great idea! I see why it is up on The news. It's still a little confusing why curation curve must change though. Will curation still get 25percent of post value?
The budget for curation rewards will not change (they will still get 25% of the post value), just the way they are calculated to keep the incentives as closely aligned to what they are today.
Thanks for the reply!
Concentrating the influence of single votes is a good idea !
It's good to try some changes on this variable.
With more flexible voting mechanisms there will appear several usecases.
Tell me its NOT going to change the rewards POOL Again!
It will actually allow it to get caught up to where it should be quicker than it is currently.
Let's hope so. It seems like the momentum is just now returning to the platform, hate to lose it again.
I agree with proposed changes although I like to better understand what the consequences are for the linear curve and the other proposed changes. Also, why would the curation curve not be linear as well? The vote power impact is something I like to better understand as well.
Can you create a slide deck in which all the features + pro's and con's are explained? Referring to an more or less obsolete whitepaper is not the correct way (as per suggestion in one of the other comments); we simply do not know anymore what is correct and what is not. A presentation with good explanations will be a very good bases to 1) make everything clear to everybody 2) reduces miss understanding 3) reduce many posts/comments and discussions based on miss understanding.
The stuff in the white paper regarding the reward curve being non-linear is still how the network operates. Find the section titled "Voting on Distribution of Currency" or skip to page 16.
The white paper is the rationale provided for the features of the network. Proposed changes to the network should include a new rationale, set in the context of the old.
Thank you, will read that section.
Although I stay with my request, for anybody creating software, I believe in proper product management. Being a product manager in the IT/Telecom space for a long time, I know how that needs to be done. It includes informing the peers in an good, informative way explaining the things I mention. This to inform colleague's but also customers and users. Already to the post you see quite a few questions that are not necessary. The more comments, the more everybody. And expect more posts being generated on this topic, with all the comments that will be made. Some will even be on misunderstanding. The document I ask for, should become part of a new wiki, or document folder to which which everybody can always refer to.
For now, I will read the whitepaper at your suggested section. And thank you again for pointing out.
I made a comment regarding linear curation rewards earlier.
We still believe that the n^2 curve would work if we had not underestimated the wealth gap that was primarily caused by the hyperinflation being paid to Steem Power early on. The small users that got in early are whales today. If you mined one PoW in the first month you would have 21 mv today. However, that is not what Steem looks like today and we need to make decisions that help that platform that exists, not the one that could have been.
I find Nˆ2 far of from linear. If we are in Nˆ2 situation, I suppose you refer to the no whale vote experiment, what are the results so far?
The small users that got in early are whales today.
How early?
I got here in August with 3 Steem, understood the purpose of the inflation, and certainly I am not a whale.
Early as in the first couple of months. (Steem launched in March of 2016)
Right, so I am a late comer.
I guess that inflation is off the table even though what we have is the same net effect without an ever increasing sp balance?
This is written in the post "We propose the weight curve be the square root function." What does this mean? IMHO, not a linear curation curve, but square root. What may I understand wrongly regarding my comment for linear curation curve?
We want fair rewards, but we also need to avoid issues with bots swaying the votes. We know there are people with hundreds of bots and those should have less combined influence than someone with the same total SP. I'm not totally clear on whether the proposal does that
That is the purpose of concentrating vote power. If you can keep your voting power below 100% then you will always allocate the maximum reward your account is allowed to. Bots will always do this because it is easy for them. This change will help human users remain competitive against bots.
Why? Until bots are self-aware, bots are just another form of users using their own stake to vote how they wish, and we fully support that.
Is there any particular reason that that should hold true? Imagine if they are hundreds of individual users voting instead of hundreds of bots. Should they be penalized voting against someone who has their combined SP?
Okay, I'm in agreement with you there but the why is vandenberg saying:
Why propose something that is expressly intended to favor some users over others (and has the indirect, perhaps unintended, effect of favoring users who sign on for five minutes make a few votes and sign off over those who particulate a lot more)?
Another negative consequence of reducing the vote target is that voting will become a lot less casual and social because people will become more aware of their vote power being depleted. The most intuitive voting system is like that on facebook, reddit, etc. where you can make as many votes as you want without 'running out of juice' (equivalent to an infinite vote target). Obviously we can't do that but reducing the vote target is moving a lot in the opposite direction.
We want to strike a balance between forcing users to be aware of their voting power and making using the site effortless. We will likely target vote strength for the median number of daily votes made by users in a typical activity band. We also have some ideas for later in the year for making a user's current voting power more visually apparent to the user.
I'm just going by how I understand it should work. For the second case, how can the system distinguish between 100 bots and 100 new users? The users should build their SP quicker if they post and comment as their curation rewards would be tiny. There's no one algorithm to make everyone happy, but we need to find the balance that will encourage new users whilst those who buy lots of Steem feel they get a reasonable return.
I definitely don't have all the answers. I'm interested in hearing other views.
Да беспредел в стиме полный......пока я разочарован.....
The Return of Minimalism