Whales: You Have Some Flagging to Do
I've already used up a bunch of my voting strength today flagging comments from @checkthisout which you can see here. Seems @grumpycat has no issue with taking as much of the rewards pool as possible without providing much value. That's quite sad. In many ways, it's just short-term thinking.
I've talked about this stuff at length before:
- Self-Voting: Scammy Behavior, Rational ROI, or Something Else?
- Flagging. Someone has to do it
- Hey Steemit. Let's Talk About Flagging. Again.
How many whales with a lot of Steem Power out there are long-term thinkers and are willing to sacrifice some curation rewards and voting strength in order to downvote this noise?
@rewardpoolrape and @eatsrewards are doing the same thing which appear to be @berniesanders projects, but it seems they are doing it to try and raise awareness about the problem. Either way, it clearly is an issue and until the community has consensus on how to deal with it on a blockchain level, the flag is all we have.
Whales: You Have Work To Do.
Flag this noise and demonstrate that you do care about the rewards pool and how it's distributed.
Sucks to have to do a post on this, but it's important. How we respond to these challenges will determine the future value of this platform.
To be clear: if you don't have much Steem Power, this post isn't directed at you. Those who have the most to lose here are the most responsible for protecting it.
Yes it is clearly abusive they don't even take time to write anything valuable even if i advocate to vote for ourselves 33% of our voting power, i disagree with their behaviour.
I am sure they are reading your post so please take into consideration the fact that you don't have to go short term full exploitative strategy, your funds are locked for 13 weeks minimum, you have to help the platform adoption rate to grow aswell, i am sure you don't want the adoption rate to fall and steem price with it while you wait for your weekly powerdown in panic dump mode.
If SBD price increase is organic you will have time to profit from it, simply vote for youselves 33% of your voting power ( 3 vote a day) and vote for contents creators to help adoption growth.
I also advice you to help new steemit users with a warm welcome, happy users do free advertising for the platform.
If SBD price is a short term PnD then you will not have a lot of time to profit anyway it doesn't represent a good ROI% compared to your stack.
Think long term guys!
https://steemit.com/steemit/@damarth/should-we-upvote-our-comments
I'm taking $25 to $30 away from each comment, we need more help! It's a huge sacrifice considering the cost of SBD, but every bit helps.
Fight for your home lands, y'all!
I actually think that right now it's better to join the self voters than to counter them.
The broken SBD peg with Steem Dollars at $8 means that currently the rewards are provided 22% by the stakeholding community and 78% by SBD speculators. That extra 350% purchasing power can be directed towards removing Steem from the market, which would raise the price of Steem due to the law of supply and demand. Raising the price of Steem would be good for all stakeholders, and in particular it would increase the supply of SBD, resulting in SBD returning to normal and all of our votes issuing more SBD per Steem.
There is a risk that the self voting taboo would be broken entirely and not just temporarily, but those who do this will end up with more voting power to police self voting in the future when there is no peg that needs fixing.
Good point. The price reaction depends on how the self-upvoters deal with their SP. Are they keeping it or are they throwing it on the market? I'd say it might be the latter.
If you counter the votes, then the SBD goes to someone else instead. Some portion of that will be used to power up, most will likely be sold for other cryptos and fiat. Some of it will have gone to people contributing value, and some will have gone to yet more self voters. At least if you vote yourself and use the money to power up or burn Steem, you can maximize the amount of speculator purchasing power (75%+ of the PP is coming from SBD speculators) is directed towards removing liquid Steem from the market.
The general assumption is that when th SBD is distributed more equally, then it will go to smaller users for whom it doesn't make sense to make payout. From that perspective it would happen other way around. But, I don't have the actual numbers. Do you statistically analyze the price/supply movements on the level of the blockchain?
We're still in a position where well over 90% of SP is held by less than 1% of accounts, so we don't yet know how that will work empirically. My hope is that it is distributed more fairly. Right now when a whale downvotes another whale, the Steem put back into the pool will mostly be distributed again by other whales.
You can see what accounts are getting the most rewards here. You can see who is primarily distributing the rewards, as well as lots of other interesting stuff here
I haven't considered that. You're right in that case. It's still a clash of the titans here on Steemit. I tend to forget that^^
Thanks a lot for the links, they were new to me. I will follow you now.
PS: I just wrote a post with a couple of possible quick and simple solutions for this reward pool rape, would be great to get your opinion to it. thx.
Some good points here to digest.
Interesting perspective, but why is a high SBD value such an issue? And how do you know those cashing out SBD are buying STEEM? Clearly they don't care about the long-term welfare of this platform, so they are more than likely buying some shitcoin that is mooning this week. I'd be surprised if they are buying STEEM. If they wanted to help the STEEM price, they'd prevent this drama and protect the network instead of create it. Stunts like this keep investors away who might otherwise really like STEEM.
SBD is supposed to be a stable token to facilitate commerce. That may not be prioritized by Steemit Inc any more, but it's still worth pursuing.
I don't, but whether they are or not, every stakeholder has the power to direct this excess purchasing power towards removing liquid Steem from the market. This would be the SBD peg in action. While the SBD peg is broken, it makes more sense to do this and to raise the price of Steem via constrained supply, than to try and plug the leak of selfish voting.
Once the peg is fixed those who purchased SP this way will have more power to police when the money is coming primarily from the community again instead of SBD speculators.
I am usually one of the ones who downvotes self voters. You can look through my history, I have regularly burned my voting power down to near 0% on downvoting self voters alone. However right now trying to police self voters is a bit like enforcing a ration during a bounty.
Every sale is somebody else's buy.
Who is buying it on the open market?
Isnt a low price, followed by a pump, in their best interests?
We need to return to 50/50 author/curators split.
We don't have a stick; so we need a carrot. Upvoting your own low value stuff should be less lucrative than upvoting other people's quality stuff.
Until we pull that trigger, this'll keep happening.
It will never be less profitable to vote for yourself than it is to vote for others when it comes to short sighted people. 50/50 won't change anything unless it is balanced with a counter incentive to vote for large account holders who guarantee curation rewards regardless of quality of content.
The proposed change to donate curation rewards back to the reward pool instead of the author is an interesting one. Every self voter will wait 15 minutes before they self vote increasing the incentive to vote for whales. More than ever, we need to balance these incentives with voting for hidden gems and underdogs.
If the goal of the few large stake-holders is to game the system, that is what they will do no matter how the math is tinkered with.
Those upvotes make me sick.
I might be that hidden gem you spoke of... COIN MAN...
@pocketechange
Whew! Good thing we fixed that problem!
Srsly.
If curators get 50% then that means 50% of the rewards pool will go to whales only. Small accounts will have very little chance to ever become dolphins or orcas because the rewards pool will just go to those who already have a ton of Steem Power. Curation rewards are near zero for small accounts.
I'd rather see them get most of the curation rewards by upvoting quality minnows, than see them get most of the posting rewards by upvoting each other.
They wouldn't upvote quality minnows. They would upvote their own sock-puppet accounts with content paid for by fiverr as we saw before. There is no silver bullet to this problem. We all just have to stay vigilant and work to continue improving things.
There is a silver bullet - just no one wants to bite it.
End curation rewards.
Problem solved.
Real simple solution:
1 vote = 1 vote, no matter what
no bots
This has the side benefit of making the whole system simpler and ready for mass adoption, since you can just get rid of Steem Power. While you're at it, might as well get rid of Steem Dollars too, since it has failed as a pegged crypto. bitAssets are the only viable pegged cryptos.
I appreciate you raising this issue for discussion and doing it in a civilized way, unlike what has been going on the last couple of weeks. I also appreciate you addressing my comment.
You're right. I don't understand but that is precisely my point. I have been a user for about 8 months and I don't understand how the system works. Sure that's on me but it is not a simple system. If the platform seeks to attain mass adoption, this will be a barrier, as will the fact that if you do not have a strong grasp of how it works and the financial means to act on that, the platform will not deliver on its promise.
I expect that this issue will become worse as the platform gains users. We will see more armies of whale bots feasting on minnows for their own financial gain. The most powerful users will be those who have no interest in advancing the community.
This isn't something I am interested in engaging in. I will continue to visit for some specific content, and I will invest in Steem by buying and selling on exchanges, but the last thing I will ever do is invest in the platform by powering up.
By the way, my comments were intended less as advice for changes to the system than they were pointing out what I see as the problems that will ultimately prevent it from reaching its goals.
Best metaphor for Steemit yet.
Thanks!
And what about limiting the amount of SP votes from whales to one account together with limiting votes from delegated power?
Dramatically reducing the number of bots is the goal, not perfection. Very expensive effort is required to defeat nominal bottraps. This has been shown widely. Captchas and 2FA are widely used because they largely work.
Also, there are things people do that bots can't. No one on Steemit, to my knowledge, has ever even tried to cut bots.
They're too profitable.
Sure, if you leave bots in place. Sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy then. Given that ~30% of SP supports the witnesses, and that but 2/3 of the top 20 are needed to fork, that's not a great expense to just buy the VP to own the witnesses.
That's not a Sybil attack. It's a bargain.
What really matters to Steemit is rewards for content. Were the gaming that produces all the distortions through bots and curation rewards obviated, retention might crack 10%.
I bet it's getting worse, instead. I've read estimates as low as 8%. Those algos aren't gonna do a bit of good on a dead platform.
Either the Steem gets more broadly distributed, or nothing will fix retention.
Losing bots, egalitarian voting, or at worst a Huey Long style 3% -300% VP, and ending curation, would leave all the whales their mined stakes, and those stakes might become of lasting value on a platform that kept it's users posting and upvoting.
No one would benefit more from a rising Steem price. Nothing less is going to raise it in the long term.
How does one get a core developers ear?
Read the real discussions in the github. Develop an understanding of the actual arguments and issues before weighing in. Then when you have something to contribute, its value speaks for itself and you gradually gain traction and respect.
Thank you
Might be worth starting from scratch.
Let me know how you get on.
More people who self vote, that wouldn't do anything considering the person who self votes gets post the author reward and the curation reward.
I think the problem cannot really be solved by flagging (the bigger the abusing accounts the more hopeless it will be to fight against self-voting with flags). Instead of that the system should be improved in a way that self-voting, circle-voting and spamming would be less attractive again. That can be tried for example by ...
implementing diminishing returns when upvoting the same accounts (including own ones) again and again.
reintroducing the restriction to four full paid posts per day (from some hard forks ago) which was very reasonable.
thinking about other ideas like a sigmoid reward curve. Due to it's flat begin it would be far less attractive to upvote posts on which nobody else is voting (self-voting of comments would be less attractive). As it also ends flat, extreme rewards (like with n^2) would be avoided, as well.
considering also other ideas like the one of UserAuthority from @scipio.
Other ideas appreciated!
There should be an open discussion (and yes, I especially would like to hear more from the witnesses here) about how to solve the self-voting problem.
As @scipio showed mathematically, diminishing returns is easily gamable, just not by people.
@scipio's idea is pretty sound, but isn't a cureall.
Sigmoid rewards curves, diminishing returns, 15 minute curation windows, yada yada yada. All such mitigations for the original problem that making rewards financially manipulable results in financial manipulators capturing almost all of them, are just further complications of a broken mechanism.
End curation rewards. They aren't necessary, and do nothing but present an attack vector. Equalize VP, or nearly so, by some metric. Doesn't really even matter much what the metric, rep, UA, equality, is, what matters is that folks have voices and earnings based on their content.
End bots. It can be at least largely done. Right now there is zero effort to curtail bots. Captchas and 2FA that revealed keys necessary to vote would almost completely eliminate bots - because making bots good enough to defeat those things is expensive.
Steemit needs to be less winner take all, and more community oriented, if it's to become a lasting community.
I know you're sincere, and think often about this, and I do appreciate that.
Thanks!
There is some truth in that!
However, also your suggestion of equalizing voting power would have some flaws: by creating many, many new accounts someone could get easily a very big influence one the platform by doing many votes (or flags) with many accounts instead of a few heavy votes ...
I agree that the voting weight of some big stake holders is too high, but investing own money to buy STEEM should still be attractive ...
And concerning the manipulators you are right, there will be always ways to game the system, but I think at least we should make it a little bit more difficult than it is now.
I share your ideas to reduce the influence of bots.
Edit: I should add that in my eyes it is a really big problem that nowadays one can write more than four fully rewarded posts/comments per day. This increases spam (and self-voting of this spam) a lot.
By preventing bots from doing this, the manual labor involved makes it unprofitable.
I reckon it's a moot point, however, as the actual market for Steemit isn't us, or even the whole world, but those 39 accounts that possess most of the Steem in the world. No changes that better distribute Steem seem to be desirable to that group, as a whole.
Bots are their best profit centers, and rewards their dividends. While the White Paper calls for disbursing ~30% of rewards to the hoi polloi, very few rewards inure to accounts that aren't whales.
Folks that are getting $.02 per post just have no dog in the fight. They don't even have a dog.
All the controversy regarding excessive rewards, returning rewards to the pool, self-voting, all of it, simply doesn't affect minnows. It's kinda like idolization of stars. Minnows are living vicariously through the whales, dreaming of ever having any rewards to guard from greedy self-voters.
All the flags on the platform in a month return about 5% of rewards to the pool. 5% of $.02 doesn't even register. None of this matters to minnows in real terms, just like Kardashians' love lives.
Posts like this can keep Steemit safe
I believe we share many of the same ideals and views in terms of long term platform health, self voting, rewards pool rape etc. I would like to establish a relationship with you and see if we are on the same track in so far as platform goals, user behavior and common problems. My posts, recent and past can provide you good insight into my thinking.
While I am not as of yet a whale here or a members of extreme influence I'm working my way up the ladder and ask that you not discredit this comment based upon my current reputation. I have considerable experience in other real world areas of expertise.
Thank you for your time.
I think either that @pawsdog's comment is not intended to grab @lukestockes attention. I'm too, devoted small fish as pawsdog is here on Steemit. We believe that majority here must be promoted to bring good content here on this platform. This is the only thing that make this place great.
I scan @lukestockes activity here as a witness for some time and this post convince me even more, that he is one of good whales here on this platform. When I grow enough and my support to him will be of significant value, he will probably get my vote.
Solid post, I hope to agree, have to see how we mesh..
Thank you for your support.
You are the man Luke! More of such influential and devoted Steemians, as you are, is needed here to make this platform really great.
I appreciate you reaching you, but the "look here" image is quite annoying. At this point we need more than just thinking, but actual code suggestions and pull requests. Some of this stuff is really complicated and involves a lot of game theory dynamics. There are no simple solutions or they would have already been implemented.
Where on Github would I find the current pull requests? You may want to check out @aussieninja I believe he has a background in coding. I'm more old school, c++, php, html.. I evolved in the days of dos, static html and drupal module coding. I have also removed the offending image :)..
I have just though of something ( I do occasionally).
I will have to leave you with the very foggy concept, and leave it with you....(as I know zero of the guts of steemit, and you do)
Is there any way there could be a structure for witnesses (or big players - to have to pay for staying in position?
i.e big players would pledge a chunk of their account, and paid to the voters - for their patronage?)
if this could be implemented , would it not make the big people spread the wealth...?
Told you it was foggy, but you see what I mean...?
(if it's total bollox, feel free to say!lol)
(if it's brilliant, I will take the accolades)
The entire structure is based on positive motivation. Witnesses and investors are rewarded for their efforts. If you remove than and reverse it, you'll get people leaving in droves to other projects which will reward their time and effort.
I may be misunderstanding you, but witnesses have to be rewarded in order to pay for the servers and the time to maintain the blockchain.
'it's total bollox' would have been suffice!😂😂😂
Hahaha :)
That motivation is being hoovered such that it isn't making it to the larger market. I've seen no proposal that might enable that to be done. The upshot from @blocktrades recent proposal is that a modified change along those lines will be undertaken in HF20 - and this will cause greater motivation to vote for whale posts.
Not the fix we need bro.
We need to get ~30% of rewards into the wallets of minnows. It's easy to see how those rewards are being captured such that they never get there.
Whales don't need rewards from the pool as a form of dividend from their investment. There are traditional dividend mechanisms that can suffice, and capital gains is the real reason to invest.
Letting whales dip into the rewards pool for dividends is like letting investors in a broom company walk out the door with the product. In Steemit's case the product is rewards for content.
It's not getting to the sales floor.
The only way it's going to is if the whales dipping into it are deprived of it. End curation rewards. Kill bots. Captchas work all over the web, and 2FA works better. Make VP more egalitarian, so that people are included, rather than excluded, from participation right from the word go.
These things would demonstrably get rewards to content authors, and end a lot of the financial manipulation that is killing Steemit user retention.
Your comment got me thinking about a solution which I call "steeminators" which I just posted here. It attempts to solve a lot of the problems you've had to deal with regarding flagging such as the time and money you had to spend flagging undesirable comments.
"Look Here" You are demanding attention for what? a post which is completely off topic and clogging up the comment section! Don't complain if you'll get downvoted.
Edit : He's now edited the post to make it more on topic
And you are? I was actually sent here by another user promoting this user and asking me to delegate SP to him as he is a good witness. I read his post above, which discusses his platform ideals and goals. I commented accordingly, on topic, and offered him a chance to network. Not sure what your are not reading or where the aggression comes from. If I get flagged for reaching out, then I guess I would know not vote him as a witness. Worry about yourself and the rest will take care of itself. :)
It wasn't on topic before you edited it ;)
And it wasn't the first time I saw you comment with an eye grabbing image and an off topic post just to promote your blog to whales. But good luck, no biggie.
I appreciate you trying to "police" comments on my blog, but please, leave that to me.
Upvote! What a wise move!
you don't own the comment section. it's annoying for us readers to have to scroll through dozens of spammy or off topic comments.
if I see spammers I'm gonna call them out! they're wasting my attention.
anyway now he's edited the post and has some relevance to the topic, before it had none.
No, I don't, and you're clearly free to do as you please. I would have preferred to see it myself.
I did add the word "reward pool rape" to clarify. Perhaps my initial comment was a bit too ambiguous for the average reader prior to that. My apologies.. no hard feelings..
Just sprinkled some 100% flags. Will do more once my VP goes up a bit. There are some 4 day old comments that I can hit when at 100% @ 100%.
Resteeming (everyone else should too).
Thank you Matt. I really appreciate your efforts to help out here.
How can I get involved from a non technical level to better the platform? What groups etc.
Hey, we're all on the same team here. It's the least I can do. Gotta take the longview.
Yeah, this is disgraceful... I wrote to a few people on steemit.chat about this particular cesspool earlier today.
As you say, this is short term greed... somebody "writing themselves $800 checks" with every upvote of non-comment on a sock puppet account. And note how the empty comments are "time stacked" so they can sit there unnoticed till about 13 hours before they are due to pay out... then they get their massive upvotes; lather, rinse, repeat.
I'm still not sure how to address all this at the code level... but I keep coming back to the idea of voting power being a two-factor algorithm. Yes the starting point is your SP, but that's also multiplied by some kind of "trust factor" so somebody who just randomly transfers in 500,000SP to a new account only has maybe... 1/10th? 1/20th? the power of a seasoned and trusted long term member who has a large "web of trust," as voted on by community feedback... a bit like reputation, but also different.
On the other end, people are expected to do what they can to get more cash. The system should be designed to work under all those incentives.
I totally agree with this comment. While sock puppet voting is bad, self-voting does some good things for minnow curators. First, it helps keep them on the Steemit platform with the incentive of making SOMETHING! Second, upvoting one's own comment is a promotion in itself, moving that comment to the forefront. How can anyone expect to ever get ahead when the can't play by the rules currently in place. I have taken the liberty of upvoting myself, mainly because I spend a lot of time creating posts without the benefit of receiving a lot of upvotes. And I do always share my voting power though. I DO NOT self-vote low effort comments though. Steemit is a two way street and until the rules change, it is what it is. I believe that once an account reaches certain thresholds, curation algorithms should change. The $800 self-written check should be a no no!
I choose not to upvote myself. On the other end we should disable it if we don't want people abusing it. I prefer to leave the choice to people, like you did.
That is one solution. But we also don't want to forbid investor to join and back the system. We maybe are pushing a certain role to some people that do not want to play that role.
If I may ask, how do you feel when you spend over two hours creating a post and you get two votes? Both from bots? It is disheartening and it has happened to me a lot. If my efforts were better rewarded, then maybe I would not feel the necessity to upvote myself and I could save my voting strength for others. It can go both ways I suppose.
Let's say it's even worst for because what I care the most about is the comments and the interaction. So this is even worst, even though we are paid to comment (my first payout ever was a comment). Upvoting myself doesn't help since the feeling of loneliness won't fade for the $$.
That might be only be me.
Ha, a lengthy post with no Upvotes and NO comments is pure loneliness!
Turning investors into curators, for example.
Thanks!
Interesting idea. What if they did something like that, where you have to be on this platform for X period of time, and post X times/get X number of votes, etc. before the "trust factor" increases? They could also tie this to reputation as well. The higher the rep, the higher the percentage you get. For example, 0 rep would bring in 0% of the earnings, 10 rep 25%, 20 rep 50%, 30 rep 75%, and 40+ rep 100%.
The only issue here, would be that people like berniesanders could still mass flag someone to kill their rep, especially if their reputation is already not terribly high. They could also mass vote an account up to boost the rep. It isn't a perfect solution, but it may slow things down.
Furthermore, what about limiting the number of accounts one person can have? I know this would be difficult to do, but they could potentially monitor suspected individuals, put them on probation if an issue is found, and ban/delete their account if they are found to be directly violating the rules in order to scam the platform. If nothing else, this would probably force people like bernie to be more careful and less brazen in his attacks. Perhaps some of the people guilty of doing this would be dumb enough to make it obvious, and get booted.
Just my thoughts, what do you all think?
Reputations scores can only be adjusted by people with higher reputation scores. That means low rep accounts can raise or lower higher reputation accounts.
Ok, I knew you had to have higher reputation to lower someone else's with a flag. You are saying it works the same for raising it? Only higher reputations upvoting you can raise your own?
As far as I understand, lower reputations can't raise the reputation of higher accounts.
In the post of @arcange, he shows that there are two rules to reputation:
// Rule #1: Must have non-negative reputation to affect another user's reputation
// Rule #2: If you are downvoting another user, you must have more reputation than them to impact their reputation
Rule #1 implies, that if you are upvoting a post of somebody with a higher reputation than you have, this has an effect as long as you have a positive reputation, with the impact depending on a) your reputation and b) your voting power. If this wasn't the case:
Wow... I had no clue about all this going on... COIN MAN...
@pocketechange
#utopian-io has a prototype of User Authority that is underway. Once they have some results and data exploring those results, they will probably make some pull requests for laying the groundwork in HF 21. Lead developer was @scipio, but I don't see any updates on this in the last month, so I don't know the current status. His intro post to the concept is at https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@scipio/userauthority-ua-explanations-applications-and-implications
Man, thanks for bringing this to the public's attention, Luke. This really makes me feel relieved that you're watching over us. Declining the payout is really awesome of you to do. Maybe if this becomes a regular thing, you could do a series that's called "The Luke-out" haha!
The last thing I want to do is police everyone, but I think if we all do our part when the time arises, we can make a difference. Thanks as always for your support, Jed.