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RE: OPEN LETTER TO STEEMIT INC., THE WITNESSES, AND THE WHALES
We started this experiment with a whole raft of measures carefully tailored to prevent abuse.
- The 4 per day limit.
- Quadratic rewards.
- 104 week power downs.
- 50/50 author/curator rewards split.
In the time I've been here, I've seen them all
discarded; like prophetic seals in some sort of cheap supernatural horror movie.
Now the spectre of widespread abuse has surfaced and everyone's wondering what happened.
Just out of interest, dyou have any idea or inclination of which of these @dan supported and whether their abandonment had anything to do with his leaving?
Edit: This was a response to a different comment. No idea why it ended up here.
I couldn't speculate, tbh.
I tend to deal in ideas; rather than people.
I don't know who pushed for what and why, I just see what isn't working and give feedback, which is the whole point of beta testing.
I have nothing but respect and gratitude for everyone involved in this project.
Very diplomatic... although on steemit the new rules (hardforks) are agreed on and instigated by a handful of people at the top (it's not a democracy is it!).... and I'd like to know more about their values to give me an indication of where we're headed!
The problem with 'unfettered capitalism' (fewer rules) is that it has a tendency to destroy itself in the long term.
We're moving away from what you might loosely call 'social-anarchism' - which would have rules in place to encourage long-term investment and broader rewards distribution.
With more social-anarchist rules in place (like pretty much all of those that have been removed) I feel this would empower and encourage MORE smaller scale investors looking to make a regular income, but this requires MORE rules!
I'd like to see more rules that empower and encourage stability, equality etc... as I commented below...fewer rules doesn't necessarily mean more freedom!
Thanks for the reply...
I think it's useful to consider that every aspect of the platform is constrained by rules, most of which are code.
Changing the code doesn't remove rules. It just changes them.
It's the specific rule that has particular consequences, so it's not whether or not we have rules, but what those rules are that matters.
There just isn't a way to prevent folks from posting more than four posts, because they can just post from another account. Neither is there certainty regarding the utility of any given code, because the real world throws sucker punches and devs are blindsided by clever criminals.
I'm all about free society. I do think the platform came out swinging for that, and it's evolution since then reflects the influences the real world has impacted it with, including that Steemit Inc. is a for profit concern and needs to serve it's market.
The market for Stinc is the Steem. The majority of Steem is held by very few people, and the interests of whales are vastly different from the interests of minnows. Steemit code starkly reflects that.
Great points well made, especially the last point. Stinc.... is that your invention?
No. Don't remember who did coin it, but I liked it and use it a lot, like I did when I found the word 'enemedia'.
104 week power downs was the worst. A very good way to drive out/scare the investors and making Steem low value.
50/50 author/curator rewards split was the best rule. It brings out the best content yet people become lazy to produce the content.
Ironically, one of my reasons for originally buying 5000 steem was the knowledge that my co-investors would also be locked in for 104 weeks.
104 weeks is a bit excessive. 52 is more reasonable.
Yeah, but what happens if a very expensive medical emergency, disaster happens, or you die (God forbid) within those 104 weeks of waiting? The droplets of Steem you'll be getting per week would be of little or no use.
Maybe it would not be so wise to invest that much money into Steem if you cannot afford medical care without powering down?
Frankly, this is going to depend severely on what country you live in.
@darthnava's personal experience with this is a perfect example.
If I was concerned about immediate liquidity I could buy literally any other crypto. Or invest half in each.
Maybe you are right. Thanks for the chat.
Hope you're doing well, mate :)
Depends what kind of investor you want. The get rich quickers or the active holders who genuinely believe the future not just for themselves but for the platform. Fact is there are more of the first kind available in the crypto world and in my opinion choosing them is us being impatient with the better option.
well it is more likely for the active holders to switch to the dark side after seeing rampant abuse and no actions from the powers that be who are capable of bringing some positive change, rather than the rich quickers turning over a new leaf... steemit can be so much more, but unfortunately the delegations, support go to the wrong places and valid suggestions fall on deaf ears...
Maybe I am misunderstanding here, but do people really think that the people producing the content, and the people who find that content deserve the same payout? If you always follow someone who you know puts out good content, then you are always somewhat riding on the coattails of that hard work right? I mean it takes a lot less effort to upvote something than it takes to create something..but that's just my two cents...
the main thing that a 50/50 split author/curator does is it puts the "brain" back in "proof of brain". Currently what we have is "proof of upvote bot" or "proof of selfvote". Check out the content on the trending pages... all vote bots and self votes. The current curation reward payout is so low that even a very skilled curator, who spends a lot of time looking for quality posts, has a hard time making more than 2 SP weekly per 1000 SP of voting power. The financial return from selling your SP in form of delegation to a vote selling service is WAY more than that. 50/50 reward split would be great for minnows, there would be a lot more motivated curators specifically looking for good posts that nave little to no pending payout, because those posts yield good curation rewards. Check out @abh12345's weekly curation league reports to see what curators currently earn. It is peanuts.
I have slowly been dragged kicking and screaming to agree with you. This comment in fact is the best, most concise explanation of why the rewards for the curators are just as important as the rewards for the content creators.
Damn reason and good sense! I so want to retreat to my former position that it's ludicrous to value the act of upvoting a post to the work that goes into creating it, which seems obvious and incontrovertible on it's face.
The truth is that valuing the labor of creation of a work is a trap. It isn't the labor of writing that is of vaue, but the content of the ideas therein, and the act of delivering value to those ideas, curation, is no less integral to the process.
You sold me. I here publicly apologize to all the folks I've disagreed with on this matter in the past, because I was wrong. Thanks for planting the seeds that have eventually prompted my growth.
If curating aka voting early actually did move quality posts into visibility then I could get on board with the idea of splitting the author/ curation rewards 50/50 ... fact is, it doesn't. If you want to find quality posts you look at the posts of the curation projects that actually review posts for quality and posts about them.
Those projects put the brain back in the proof of brain not early voting.
If you mean the 50/50 reward split, each post only has one author, and multiple curators, many of whom I'm sure the author would like to see rewarded for their support.
I guess. I mean, I typically support the people who follow me by upvoting their posts and comments. I don't expect to make anything from "curating" their content. I think that what someone earns on upvotes should primarily go to them, especially since it's so hard to get upvotes for most people as it is. On top of the fact that a lot of these Dapps already take a HUGE chunk of someone's earnings. So a vlogger who spends hours a day uploading quality content is only supposed to make 25% of what they earn? Dtube takes out 25% and this 50/50 would vastly cut into their earnings. I'm not saying curators shouldn't make anything, but again, the difference between hours and hours of work vs. clicking the upvote button are insane!
Would it be hard to get upvotes on your quality posts if heavy hitters were scouting around looking for fat curation rewards, instead of shamelessly upvoting their own crap?
They're going to get a return on their investment; upvoting quality posts should be their most lucrative option.
SBD being an easy pump and dump target just increased how bad the disparity between curation and author rewards became.
Is the solution to a lot of the "woes" here not painfully obvious? Have the same payout options for authors and curators. Curating shouldn't get only SP while authors get to choose whatever is paying the best at the time.
I'm of the camp that curators should get 50% or something around there. Even if some large account holders are bad taste-makers, they're even worse content creators. I really don't want to be on a social media platform where the crypto-rich are literally forced to "create content" and roll out a pile of fresh dung every morning in order to maximize their ROI.
I can feel my mind expand as I read the words you have written.
Thanks!
Yeah, the Dtube thing throws things off a little more, but a worthwhile variable to consider as these ideas are evaluated.
You seem pretty intelligent, I'm going to go see what you've been up to.
The 50/50 reward split was terrible in my opinion for everyone but a very small amount of content creators. The whales just put a handful of people who made non contreversal cookie cutter content on auto voters and called it a day. They could not even check this place out in 2 month and earn a stupid amount of money and since the reward curve was so skewed in their favor they were becoming ultra whales. No one really liked that system except maybe 30 people.
Good point.
Interesting, I've never put as much thought into that as you apparently have.
Yeah not trying to be a rabble rouser, I have just been hearing from a lot of people in the Dtube community specifically lately, and between being perplexed about high quality content being met with totally random and inconsistent upvoting, and crap content being self-voted to the moon through the use of bots, vloggers are getting discouraged, and a few of them have even dropped off. It's true that Steemit owes users nothing, but I maintain that the same applies in reverse. Steemit needs great content to keep people engaged and coming back to use the platform, or to join it to begin with. It seems as though any concern about payouts and upvotes that aren't holly jolly is being blown off as being a negative Nancy, and I don't know if I totally agree with that.
If at this point we also tell vloggers especially, that even more of their upvote amount is going to be detracted, I think a lot of them will leave. It isn't such a big deal for bloggers, but for those trying to use the Dapp interface rather than just copying and pasting YouTube videos, they have to go through Dtube, and are therefore forced to give up that percentage of their earnings, and it's not that Dtube doesn't have a right to those percentages, they are letting people use their platform after all, I'm just not sure how well all of this will go over. Although, people are always averse to change, but then usually adjust, so I guess it's hard to say what will happen until it actually happens! Just my two cents!
I think a reoccurring issue that might deserve some due attention is the problem of those unmoderated vote bots. I know it might be a dangerous statement to make, but most crap post that get high upvotes only seem able to get high upvotes because vote bot owners aren't really moderating the use of their bots in an any way meaningfully way. In other words, the crap producers are actually less to blame for the growing amounts of crap on the platform than the bot owners that allow the same crap producers to to use their upvote service, unmoderated, month after month.
Well, it's basically just putting the advertising model in automated form, and without the sponsor.
My feeling is that automated upvotes are promotion, and posts that are availed of them should be in the promoted feed. There are ways to parse the source of the promotion fee, if hostile promotion pushing posts into the promoted feed becomes a problem.
The crap producers are really a symptom of the problem, which actually derives from rewards pool mining. It is the delegation dealers that ultimately demanded this code. Stinc is dependent on them, and delivered what it's market wanted.
It's important to remember that Stinc serves a market composed of Steem, not people.
Thanks!
Read somewhere else that vote bots were probably under 18% of the pool, so it's not the vote-buyers producing most of the highest voted crap you see, surprise surprise large investors in crypto or devs aren't the creative souls the internet was holding its collective breath for!
You bring a very important point to the table.... or four of them. I'll upvote for visibility as long as we are discussing all of this.
backing that upvote up, cause yep, he's right. Dan built it to last, and somehow, that got shifted back. Why? Do you recall the history? I didnt get here till June 2017, and HF19 was the most monumental shift I have yet personally seen go past. My question is WHY were these rules abandoned and who drove the requests that became the patches and what was their personal motive in each case? Sure, I understand that they were each debated and opted in by the top 20 but to who's gain or detriment?
from my observations ... the same complaints about the end result of the previous rules are being made about the current ones. Some people's memories get really short.
Those who gain are happy with the code. Those who don't complain.
I was thinking of what change could benefit steemit as a whole, without limiting freedom. Maybe something like this:
The distribution will not start until day 101 after implementation. One percent of total will be given per day.
This may not solve everything, but it does give back to steemit. I don't know how easy it would be to effect this change so lets hear from the developers/experts.
This does not address the comment upvote dilemma, but I'm sure it could be similiarly addressed if this idea is technically feasible.
kind of like a graduated income tax? combined with basic income?
It is a tax. And it could be considered communist-like if steemit was a country and we use the tax like most countries do.....wastefully or to line the pockets of the politicians. However, this tax would be used to encourage interaction and engagement with others within the system. You would not receive unless you meet certain criteria. That criteria would need to be determined. I have just listed suggestions.
The percentages may vary, like taking 25% of monetary rewards for the top 10% instead of taking 50%. However, it is a give-back program to incentivize interaction. It is not a charity. It would encourage those with less rewards to keep trying to engage others.
This would also serve as a defacto flagging system, since this would likely catch those persons that have whales upvoting them to the top of the earnings list.
Let me know you thoughts.
Opt in blockchain based taxes are an interesting idea.
I already posted this idea on another comment here,
but what if instead of having a "tax"
Would that be feasible?
I just reread the comment that started this thread.
He called it quadratic rewards.
Perhaps the easy solution is to revert from linear payout back to as he called it quadratic rewards.
It was the opposite.
The bigger the payout, the more each upvote added.
Really!?! Thanks for clarifying that.
I see you've been around since Aug 2016, so did you live through this change?
I'vve thought of something that if people who don't post or comment their VP goes down. Then people like @ranchorelaxo with @haejin can't game the system. Because they are just an investor. Rancho isn't here for Steemit Community. He is here for himself. Why should he only benefit himself. Each week he don't contribute by making content % of his vote strength goes down.
If he was here for himself then he should delegate to a Bid-bot and make 500% more than he is currently doing, curating a chartist whos content is as valuable for as long as it takes him to make the post.
You need to wake up & come back to REALITY. He provides nothing worth what he is making. And TRUST ME. He would never SPEND money towards anyone else. Even if it made him money. He only SPENDS his MONEY, VOTES, anything on HIMSELF!!!
You need to re-read my comment!
You need to RE-READ MINE.
Interesting, thanks for adding your insight and input @celsius100!
Now you arent saying "they Never get 50% of the rewards" or "that they go to someone else", you are just saying the reward is delayed?
I could see some merit in that. Interesting to think about!!
Peace
That could be one option I hadn't thought about. Set aside an amount from the top earners each day. It will be theirs, but it could only be used with the steemit platform. Given away to others, as such. It could not be withdrawn.
I would suggest, though, that needy projects should be the ones to receive the donations. Those endorsed, by vote, from the steemit populace. That way, the rewards would not be easily given to accounts of friends and family or themselves (through anonymous accounts). Thanks for your input.
You'd have to rework flagging, because any system like that would create more of an incentive for the smaller pockets to start flagging each other to below any rep cutoffs you set.
I'm relatively fresh here, but I'm for it! Make restrictions, make regulations, make BALANCE, lose the whales, lose the idiotic meme posting accounts...Even 4 post per day is too much I think, in my opinion, 2 at most! And powering down from time to time is in game.
It would be nice to have a curator slide, just like the vote slider but earlier on.
Very peaceful means to combat the problem and avoid flag wars. Upvoted.
I try.
I agree with the idea of a post limit. Personally, I had a hard time following Papa Pepper's suggestion of 2-4 post per day for success on Steemit. I just don't think in that realm of reality. I can't blog of vlog about every insignificant event in my life or the lives of others that many times a day because it doesn't inspire me to do so.
I look for things that have never been said before. Because of that, I have a hard time repeating myself, but I felt like there was a very specific message that I had last fall that people weren't quite getting in general which has to do with the changes that cryptocurrency will introduce to society. Then the only way I could stop repeating myself was to get into the technical details and wrote this way for a bit and realized it was just too much for most people. I found that I was just rewriting the same ideas from a different angle because of this need to post daily at minimum.
So I've been thinking of kicking back to about one or two posts per week when there's something really important to say. I think the monetary incentive is just a little too much for posting multiple times a day and creates more spam. If you knew you had fewer shots to hit the target, you'll take your time and aim better.
I just sent for that same silver hex! @pit-bullion is coming out with a 5 oz
While I reckon most of those things were better abandoned, I do absolutely agree with 50/50 curation split, now.
This is worth the price of admission. What excellent and evocative writing!
50/50 reward split? I spent hours, days to write up my content and I have to share half of it? Why do I even bother writing a 500 to 2000 words post when i can just autoupvote posts. And here i was complaining about appics' reward distribution. 65% to author 10% to company 25% to curators. Video editing can take hours as do writing. As a content creator, 50% is not a good incentive. What happens when everyone just prefer to autovote and no contents gets produced? 80% is a great number to incentivise authors to produce. I think the 50/50 will not fly and will greatly devalue steemit.
50% of what your quality post makes today, probably not; but for 50% of what your post makes if whales were voting for you instead of for themselves, I think you'd continue to grace us with your presence.
"If" whales vote for me. I don't think distribution is the answer anyway. If they can't be stuff about curating who can force them to. If they want to vote for themselves, it is their money after all. If they want to circle jerk each other so be it. I don't think we will find the answer until we test out the waters. Implement something, see what happens. How about a rule that stops a whale from voting their own post?
I am sympathetic to your arguments, as @carlgnash just managed to convince me they weren't as incontrovertible as I'd thought on this post.
Whales can just buy votes from bots. Such a rule would do nothing. It's also how to get around the 4 post limit. Just post from another account.
I'll reiterate here the reason that it's a good idea to split rewards 50/50, since you may not see my earlier discussion with @carlgnash.
It's a trap to focus on the labor of writing or creating content as a guage of it's value. This is illustrated by the old saw about 100 monkeys typing out Shakespeare eventually.
The value in content comes from the ideas presented therein, and curation is the act of delivering value to those ideas via the market. While the act of upvoting is trivial, seeking out good content (particularly on Steemit with it's broken feeds) is a significant task.
Also, ALL the curators split the curation reward, and thus are but fractionally rewarded compared to the author. So the dichotomy isn't quite as stark, except for posts where whale curation might dominate the curation reward.
While it takes significant labor to create good content, it takes labor to produce crap content, and one being rewarded and the other not depends on good curation.
It's worth compensating.
Beautifully well said.
Comparing the effort of writing with the effort of upvoting is looking very superficially at the issue.
If money is a substitute for labour, then the money I have tied up in the SP I use to upvote, is 'effort' I've expended engaging with the post.
In my opinion back then when those rules were in place the STEEM blockchain didn't have much of a future. It was primarily going to be a whale hangout and since the distribution was messed up it was going to be about 15 or 20 whales circle jerking each other passively.