You are a Zero | The Dust Threshold
So after weeks of waiting for your account, it is finally here and you write your #introduceyourself post and depending on your luck could amount to a couple of pennies or a few dollars if I whale or dolphin is feeling generous and decides to grace that tag.
So after the euphoria of earning something on your first posts, your next few posts don't do so hot. Mostly a few cents and just a few engagements but it's ok at least you got 1 cent out of it and to make a dollar you need the cents.
Well, let me give you a blunt force trauma moment here. If your post did not reach the threshold of 0.02 cents or worst because of lower price of steem your payout is 0.019 then that turns to dust. Poof! It gets rounded back to zero. Congratulations your work is now dust!
I would say that I am a pretty informed guy but this today I learned something new which drastically impacts the way that I vote.
It all began when discussion in The Empire was brought to a standstill by the tax man @eonwarped as he dropped this information on us. Any posts/comments that do not reach 0.02 cent will be rounded to zero in the coding called The Dust Threshold*
DAFUQ was my first reaction and he showed us an even more controversial piece on one of the witnesses suggesting that the threshold raised even higher.
If we increased this threshold up to 0.10 SBD, or even 0.25 or 1.00 SBD - then posts/comments that did not receive sufficient votes to pass this threshold would receive zero payout. This would likely decrease the incentive for users to create spam.
This can be further read on this post Proposal to make spam less profitable
The Dust Threshold is not in the FAQ and could only be seen in the Github repository.
Your average user would not have thought of checking there. Hell, I wouldn't check there!
The purpose is good that we are to lessen the incentive of spammers to exist but is a double-edged sword that will also hurt red fishes like me who are starting out.
To put into perspective say the suggestion goes to the max of one dollar to deter spammers. The spammer will just need to create enough accounts to reach beyond the threshold and since SP is compounding their spam accounts will just grow stronger by time and curation. He'll eventually have enough money to power up and self-vote, and have his numerous accounts trail that vote and he can do this to his comments for faster results. It will never be in the trending because it is small enough to avoid detection. They could use tags that rarely used to avoid other people from seeing it.
They can also do small bidbots to make sure that it goes above the threshold. Multiple posts a day and no one is the wiser.
In the meantime, your new redfish is struggling. Even if he gets some of his peers to vote for his post it hardly gets to the threshold. A lot of people don't even take into account voting power and that vote goes weaker and weaker as the community tries to vote up eveyone.
Take example this post. of mine as an example.
Thirteen upvotes including mine and some level of engagement but since it barely made 0.06 cents this thousand word post will have its payout turn to dust. NIce way to motivate people. Work hard and do your due diligence for a few months and get some whale or dolphin votes in.
You practically asking a person to work for free. If one does not even get even the tiniest reward what is to stop the person from just going back to Facebook or whatever social media app they are using.
Saying that eventually you will get there is just sugar coating the matter and providing a false hope. Even I who have been on the platform for 6 months have some difficulties in reaching more than a dollar.
More than the post value I was not happy about learning that this also affects comments. So if a comment also does not reach the 0.02 dust threshold it is also dust.
WTF and here I was thinking that I was spreading my vote and rewarding people who comment with 0.01 as a way of me appreciating them for engaging. me. Then I learned that all I did was to waste my VP.
@eonwarped has a great explanation on the dust threshold in this post Life on the Knife's Edge
Take the recent claims, which is 438,982,750,788,960,641, which is the weight of all recent votes.
Take the reward balance, which is 749,780.858 STEEM, this is the per block reward that changes according to a fixed schedule of inflation, so it slowly changes.
Take the feed price, which is 2.669 SBD.
Now compute
(rshares/claims) x rewardbalance x price
And that's what the current value of your post or comment is. In the case of this post, it is
4,607,112,884/438,982,750,788,960,641749,780.8582.669 = 0.021
So instead of feeling satisfaction that I am doing something good then I am shortchanging the engagement that is happening.
So I am changing the way that I reward people that I engage with. In my posts I will make sure that it reaches 0.03 cents and this would mean I would upvote less in comments outside of my posts. It will lower the number of votes that I will be able to give out as I will maintain my Voting power to the same limit I have.
Now for those Steemians that have their upvote value is 0.01 only instead of upvoting a good comment you can reply to that and I suggest you check the person out and if you find a post still within pay out that you life upvote that and comment and maybe that person becomes an engager and a fan. Win-win!
Thank goodness that the suggestion of raising the threshold was put to rest for now because it was just anti-minnow and would make it harder for people to stay motivated. The truth of the matter not a lot of whales is upvoting. Yes, we still have some but the majority of it is locked away in delegation to bidbots, vote-selling, and collusion with circle jerking.
You only have a couple of curation guilds and most communities have small votes. To do this is to close off a whole spectrum of users and tell them to go fuck themselves.
It irked me to find some of the comments saying that if they did not reach the proposed threshold then the post and comment is of no importance. It is such elitist thinking that makes one wonder if people still really care or if they have been up high so long that they don't know the struggles of those joining now.
Get off your high horse and try doing it without your network, without the huge SP behind you and no money. Lets see how long before you give up. The attrition in this platform is huge and if don't take care of them now all we will be left are the few whales and high SP dolphins and those they support. And of course the bidbots. Posts will be just graveyards of bot messages of upvotes.
This is our community, care for the little ones.
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Hey, @maverickinvictus.
Would you mind taking a look at this screenshot of the last HF 20 update and tell me what you think it says. I'm trying to figure out how this doesn't already address the Tim Cliff kerfuffle and how you can raise a dust threshold that will be eliminated. Thanks, sir!
It means unless you buy SP to add to your account, you do not matter to those who got in early.
It definitely seems that way. At least with some. I haven't ran into everyone yet. :) The sad thing is, I did buy SP, or STEEM rather, then powered it up. And it's not an insignificant amount for me. But to those holding higher SP it probably is too small to matter. :)
This is just showing that those with wallet power is the only thing that matter and should be rewarded.
For teh rest of the poor saps like me have some dusts.
What amazes me is the with each patch they do, it seems like the law of unintended consequences swings heaviest on the lower levels. I guess I would have to be on higher levels to really know, but I'm not, so I'm not sure what other perspective to try to have that I can actually relate to.
I'm still here, though. Posting, commenting and curating. :)
So that's basically making all votes under 1.2 get reabsorbed into the system? Which is supposed to stop larger accounts from making those 5% votes? Does that compound like the dust vote, or if 10 people made 10 votes worth 1 each it would all get absorbed?
I think the payout dust threshold is slightly higher than 1.2, but basically yes—if something doesn't get over the threshold, and then maintain it (because amounts adjust over the seven day period) then it's gone, reabsorbed, whatever happens to it. That part, I'm not so clear on, just where it all goes. It would seem to me that once it's created and allocated that it couldn't just disappear, which means it goes somewhere. I don't know. I've been hoping someone might answer that.
I'm not sure what it's supposed to do against the larger accounts. It's supposedly keeps the computation load on the blockchain down. That's what I got out of it.
As long as the accumulative amount on the comment or post exceeds the payout threshold (0.019 or whatever) then no, it wouldn't be absorbed. So ten people each voting $0.01 would make $0.10 and get paid accordingly.
Hey @glenalbrethsen, do you mind telling me where you found the last update information so I can read the whole thing?
It came from the Steemitblog at the end of December. Here's the link: https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/hardfork-20-velocity-development-update. That's the last one I've seen from them regarding a HF 20 update, but that doesn't mean someone else like a witness hasn't provided some information since. There's plenty of other things of interest on the steemitblog too.
An "attempt" to make it fair for everyone as they saw that some larger sp users profit from votetrailing Curation trails with "inconsequential" votes of 1 percent or lower on some trails.
Well that again is something I don't like because it again affects me. I have set a 1 percent vote to one trail as they usually upVote up to 30 people a day if I set it higher then it will destroy my voting power.
Although I don't do it for curation rewards but for the fact that I want to support what it votes on so with a shifting down it will make my vote useless.
Wow just wow on some of these ideas. Facepalm after facepalm.
Yeah, so I guess my point in sharing all this is, people weren't happy, and rightly so, about Tim Cliff's idea, but his was just that, an idea, one, as far as I know, he couldn't just implement.
In this case, and more, this is what's actually coming our way, good, bad, ugly and in between. And as far as I know, there's no opportunity to address or readdress them. And to whom, even if it were possible?
Guess someone needs to make posts that address the top 20 witnesses and the largest voters thereof?
Seems to be about the only way, outside of maybe getting on Discord and chatting with them. I think there's a lot that goes on there because I keep hearing about such being the case.
The witnesses could then address it with Steemit or the devs or whoever, but from what I've read from earlier posts than steemitblog HF 20 update, they already conducted a polling months ago. At least a month or so before the update. So, I think HF 20 is pretty much a done deal. Except we haven't seen it yet, of course. :)
If most steemians especially the newbies know about this threshold and did not have enough passion for what they write, then most people will not be motivated.
There are some people who have enough passion for what they write but we can't also neglect the fact that we are all here because of the payout. So if all effort turns to dust then what is the gain apart from attracting readers and impacting knowledge on them.
The threshold will not only affect spammers but steemians that are struggling to get something for their efforts and this will increase the power of bidbots since most people will now rely on it.
I hope the threshold will be put into consideration to favour the new but struggling steemians.
I do understand that they do want to take action against spammers, but they should try to find a solution which would not harm any of the groups within the Steem Ecosystem!
This will be extremely hard.
When I did read through all the answers, I did make some conclusions.
There are different groups of users, the investors against the genuine users.
All groups of users have a different view about how steem should evolve.
And maybe most of all, the current whales and higher ranked Steemains did forget how hard it was in the beginning and don't understand that it even got harder to get noticed!
You are right @fullcoverbetting. They should also remember that starting on steemit is a struggle on it's own and if someone can continue to struggle to get noticed they why should their post be "a dust"?
My jaw just dropped on the whole concept of the dust theory.
People especially from Third World countries like mine don't have the capability to invest in Steem Power and to be told off in such a way that if their post or comment didn't reach that threshold then it simply meant it was not important enough.
A lot of posts of whales are like WTF because they have the power means they can reward themselves to be significant.
Not everyone can invest in Steem Poer but at least they can put in an effort to accumulate it and these efforts should be recognized.
I won't blame the whales but they should try and go out of the circle and add more steemians to their circle.
Indeed there are some people that does not care if the pay outs are low and is just writing their passions but some people are moved by the promise that it will eventually pay out. So all those comments that people leave and receive 1 cent upvotes thinking that it will all add will have the rude awakening that it is dust.
If there is a promise to get something for every effort, then why will it be so hard to fulfill that promise someone else has relied on and using as a motivator?
They just have to look for a means to favor everyone on steemit and deal with spammers.
If i like a comment and try to show my appreciation that means it just a wasting of time.
I hope they will think this through.
Thats a good idea, and one I will share with the peeps who ask what they should do about their tiny vote.
Yes it is a good workaround so we can still continue to reward good comments :) That is great if you can share that Amy!
The worst part is the rewarding of comments. I used to upvote comments (destroying my VP in the process...). After reading an article similar to this, I realised that it was all for nothing (other than moral support, but you can't eat that!). I understand the reason for the dust limit, but it could have been more clear from the beginning.
True that when I was doing the upvotes on comments I thought I was adding value to people who were commenting on my posts.
These should be added to the FAQ.
wow I didn't know about this. I'll use this information wisely to upvote more to posts :) thanks for the heads up :D
I didn't know it as well! to my utter surprise and horror!
Hahaha that always scared Dexter
Thank you for sharing about this, and for your passionate defense of minnows and redfishes. I'm glad I know about this now, and I will be thinking about what it means for my VP as I grow my SP.
It is my pleasure to provide information that is of value and important to the community.
This one impacts everyone from Redfishes to whales as I observe even some of the people upvote comments below the threshold.
I have. Adjusted the way that I vote to reflect this new information and it has caused me to have lower number of votes given but rewards people that took the time to make a good comment.
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Thank you SteemEngine for recognizing the value of this post! I truly appreciate it.
Hi Mave. I’m happy to see you also wrote a post on the issue. Awareness is important so people can know to use their upvotes wisely. I feel particularly bad when it is a newbie upvoting my comment, not knowing about this threshold. It would be better off if they saved their VP on posts and maybe get some curation rewards.
Best we can do is continue raising awareness.
Yeah I just had to because I didn't know this if eon had not shown this I would have in ignorance still do my voting like before and not reward those that interact with me.
I don't want to give dust to those that took the time to read my work.
Indeed Beeyou! This is important as I see a lot of redfishes "wasting" their VP by upvoting comments and thinking that they are rewarding people when it just becomes dust.
Indeed that is why I suggested that instead of having it turn to dust we are better off by going to a post of the commenter and upvoting a post that we like and commenting. There will be a big chance that the person will become a follower if they do that! Win-win!
That is the only thing we can do raise awareness and inform people.
I am on the same page as you @maverickinvictus!
I did reply on the post of Tim Cliff. And also wrote some post about it just like you. Bothto inform people and to try to explain why this would be a bad move!
Good that you have posted it, in the section where it could make a difference!
Yes saw your awesome comments there and man when I was reading the comments there that some people were in agreement it was just a facepalm moment one after another for me.
How could these people even suggest something like this and it just goes contrary to what I believe this platform stands for.
Its like highschool that if you are not part of the cool kids you better sit in a corner while patiently increasing your SP.
But they do underestimate the value of the red fishes! They did forget how hard it was in the early day, even then, and they don't understand that it is even harder now to get noticed.
The most offensive reply where the ones, where some would say that an upvote of new steemians isn't worth anything. Cause this post doesn't add any value to the blockchain. I was thinking WTF!
I know!!! and like come on so newcomers are treated like dirt just because they don't have a whale backer or doesn't do TA's or programming.
Where in the hell is the social aspect here. This is turning into a rant haha.
The social aspect seems to be in our imagination.
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EDIT, Sat, 21.4.18, 9:59am, CST:
I wrote the above on same day but didn't click 'Post' and just found it now when I noticed your reply to my other comment, @maverickinvictus! LOL