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RE: Whitepaper Discussion on Voting Abuse
- The current split is not even 75/25 it is more like 88/12 (last count I saw; may be inaccurate). Going back to 50/50 (or frankly even actual 75/25) would be a big change and would likely have large effects (including much, much less relative incentive to self-vote). That's not to say there are no circumstances where someone would still prefer to self-vote, but it would likely move the needle a lot.
- My goal in advocating for such a change would not be to change the behavior of the abusive users, that likely can't be helped. It would be to encourage more non-abusive users to participate in curation, by rewarding them more consistently and in larger amounts. Not only does that yield a direct payoff in more rewards to non-abusive users but it also reduces both the influence and rewards flowing to abusers by virtue of dilution (since the total is fixed).
I have generally been more on the side of keeping it 75/25, but I have been warming up to the idea of 50/50 as a way to incentivize better curation.
My biggest reservation is because I still don’t think that the current curation implementation actually incentives people to be good curators, whereas ‘good’ is defined as filtering through the content and identifying the posts/comments that add the most value to the platform (subjective opinion of course). People will continue to vote (mostly through auto upvotes) on what they predict will earn the most rewards. The premise that they are one and the same has unfortunately proved to be false in practice - at least with the current way things are setup/working.
Another factor is that curation rewards generally favor users who already have a larger stake in the platform. Any user can join the platform and be a successful author or commenter (provided they have the skills) but to be a successful curator requires having a significant amount of SP (whether bought, earned, or delegated).
One change that I think will be easy to get people on board with is to reduce the early voting penalty from 30 minuets down to around 5. That would at least bring the balance closer to the 75/25 compared to the current 88/12.
This is true but with linear rewards the effect is greatly reduced. It's certainly the case that more SP generates more rewards, which is natural, and probably okay (and doesn't really promote a 'rich get richer' effect), but to what extent it has a higher return on investment, I don't know, though it is almost certainly much flatter than before.
As a first step I agree with shortening the reverse auction (with other benefits), and we can see how much that changes things. Some part of the effect will be faster bot votes so the aggregate shift may not be that much, I don't know.
Another intermediate step I would support is enforcing actual 75/25 instead of dynamic. When the reverse auction reduces curation rewards on a particular post or comment, instead of giving them to the author, put them back into a pool for other curation, so the mix of author/curation always stays at 75/25 (or whatever specified mix).
One thought to offer in closing: If 'most reward' doesn't correlate with 'good' (value adding) content as you suggest, then posting rewards are no less dysfunctional than curation rewards (i.e. it means content that isn't 'good' is being rewarded). I don't see that as a particular reason to favor author rewards over curation rewards, do you? At least increased curation rewards has the potential to improve this situation by incentivizing more effort on curation. I don't see where more author rewards do anything to improve the dynamic of bad voting. The latter seems almost impossible.
The reduction of the early voting penalty should be the easiest to pass since it isn’t very controversial and it would be an easy change.
The variable curation/author split that which can be set by the individual platforms (or even the users), rather than being hardcoded to 75/25 seems like a really interesting idea too. There are details in @jesta’s reply to the recent steemitblog post. I wonder if we can rally support around that.
Yes, clearly the latter is a more significant change in terms of implementation, maybe controversial, hard to say. But yes, very interesting idea. Overall I agree with your assessment.