RE: Should We Raise Curation Rewards From 25/75 To 50/50?
Voted for
- Yes
My vote is yes to 50/50 as a good first step, but just to clarify on my position, check out the end of this comment at the "extra" as I just want to focus on the 50/50 item atm.
Concern: 50/50 is too heavy. 40/60 might be better. Curators are taking too much of a cut while doing much less than authors. Better to focus on more apps and biz. There will be a different maximization game with the change.
Response:
Firstly, think of a hypothetical Steem economy with 100% author rewards and 0% curation rewards, 100/0. Voters will most likely just upvote themselves all the time. Broadly speaking, 100/0 is in effect, the economic equivalent of 0% author rewards and 100% curation rewards, 0/100, as voters just end up getting all the rewards voting anywhere. Nothing left for authors either way for any decent content. Looking at this symmetry, it stands to reason that 25/75 today is in effect like 75/25, and 40/60 is like 60/40. So 50/50 is in effect, just the same at 50/50. In fact I'd expect anything besides a close approximation of the 50/50 effect would end up collapsing into somewhere near the 0/100 or 100/0 region, after a long period of time. Again, just broadly speaking though. Not really debating 60/40 or 40/60 is better than 50/50, as long as it achieves the 50/50 effect in the end for every vote given out to something decent.
Secondly, authors effectively get their rewards from curators, and authors are also curators themselves. It's a social network blockchain. Personally, I don't really get the dichotomy here even though there are obviously users that only create or curate. Saying no to improved curation reward is almost like telling our sponsors they shouldn't get the best and most sensible returns possible from supporting our work.
Thirdly, imagine a channel where the best curators hang out while onboarding / promoting great content creators. Let's say Pewdiepie or whoever else you're already digging on Steem or anywhere else. With the right incentives, we'd be happily voting on content that we're already consuming everyday and even take the time to promote upcoming great content creators. Sure, the many different apps that developers build are important, but I can't think of a better business for everyone other than going the route of trying to improve Steem's economy via its rewards or POB protocol, something which no user interface or application can ever do. More biz and apps are good but they're not necessarily Steem's topmost differentiating factor in crypto. There are plenty of high performance blockchains for biz and stuff. It's better to get Steem's economy around the right ballpark with the community we have, build it, and then the best of apps and biz will thrive along the way.
Extra:
I hope the other 2 items would get considered sometime in the near future to seal all the conceivable leaks in the boat the best we can. It also adheres to a better blockchain philosophy in my opinion, if considering notions of quality & quantity & incentives. Everything we encourage shoving into the chain is a cost someone has to bear in the future, etc. Sure we can and should have loads of activities coming from a social blockchain perspective, but incentives are another matter and not necessarily and straightforwardly all kinds of activities == incentives. We shouldn't get mixed up between these arguments. Minimize costs and maximize benefits. Cliche, but it's paramount to any blockchain design, moreso than anything that revolves around traditional databases if we're considering a very very long-term game.
Maximizing rewards through whatever means, even the most lazy via curation trail is perfectly fine. There just needs to be checks and balances in the economy (as proposed in the link above) so it can at least benefit Steem as a whole over time. Even the most hardworking people will be lazy at some point, or lazy in certain dimensions. Or whatever, lazy is not really the point. We just need to design a environment or economy where lazy produces something good, like a working content discovery and rewards platform. Imagine if lazy autovoters are voting on crap stuff. Some "bribe" and deterrence from the change to 50/50, superlinear rewards, and downvote pool will likely change behavior or the "path of least resistance" to point to the good stuff that actually helps the platform.
Of course, a working economy means a positive feedback loop on the network, and that would necessitate improvement in part of reward beneficiaries as time goes on. It's the other way around at the moment, imo.
I appreciate your substantive and informed comment, even though I strongly disagree.
It's been tried, and through socks it happens alla time. Remember @mindhunter though? He's just gone after his ploy was revealed. The community disapproves of self voting, and for good reason. Why have rewards at all? To create incentive to produce quality content that markets Steem and potentiates capital gains for stakeholders. While curation rewards were instituted to further create incentive to do that, they don't amount to much for insubstantial stakeholders, who in general just ignore them as a reason to upvote.
Curation rewards thus aren't any incentive for the majority of votes. For those with substantial stake, curation rewards are the end - not curation. Votes cast to attain curation rewards by those folks are cast without regard to content quality at all - contrary to the purpose of curation rewards - but solely and strategically to gain rewards.
Until vote bots arose self votes and similar mechanisms were roundly criticized as simple profiteering (and that censure has now included votebots), that at best did not create incentive to come here and buy some Steem and drive the price up. That's a good reason. So, let's admit that curation rewards don't work for the purpose they were instituted to achieve, and go on. @edicted proposed giving authors a slider, so they could set curation rewards to whatever they wanted, and despite my initial advocacy for eliminating curation rewards completely (as simply another vector for extracting rent with stake) I agree this is a better solution, as it becomes a means of attracting votes by letting voters attain to the rewards themselves - eliminating bidbots and enabling authors to promote their posts by eschewing rewards to the degree they are willing to.
As my goal for Steem is nothing short of world dominance, I want to see investors acting to create capital gains, and float every boat. Profiteering is contrary to that, despite lolbertarian freedom to do what one wants with one's stake. It isn't wise to drain the blood from a barnyard animal you'd like to sell at market for a good price, and that is analogous to profiteering and extracting rewards from the platform when you'd like to see Steem generate capital gains. Plus, it's gross, and the community does seem to dislike it.
Instead let's consider mechanisms that allow substantial stakeholders to get dividends by delegating to development projects that potentiate capital gains. Let's also limit potential rewards on posts, to eliminate that vector as suitable for profiteering. Huey Long proposed that no one should live on less than 3% of median income, nor attain to more than 300%, and I reckon that's not going to impact actual content quality negatively, as that's a significant range that allows incentive to be exerted, while also making bidbots useless for folks that abuse them just for rewards. Now, Long proposed that when he was very popular and no little ferment was ongoing in the US, and got assassinated for his trouble. I'd prefer not to get shot.
The rewards pool has been gamed to the point that Steem is suffering from poor enough optics that we underperform the market. Tweaking curation rewards isn't going to fix the problem of profiteering, as you acknowledge, and simply eliminating curation rewards won't either. Creating a vector for dividends from delegating to development projects, and limiting the extractive potential of votebots does make it possible to decrease financial incentive to abuse curation for profiteering, and enabling dividends from delegation presents a mechanism that will drive capital gains. Maximizing rewards at any cost isn't wise. You point this out:
Maximizing rewards for improving development and driving capital gains is what actual investors should want. It sure is what the market wants to see, as well as most everyone on Steem today. If you got this far through my extemporaneous comment, I am grateful.
Thanks!
50/50 alone isnt that effective, from my pov the fix would need other measures as per linked in my comment above. It should be thought of as a chord to play and wouldnt sound as nice if we just play one note. If curation rewards aren’t important, then 100% author rewards would just cause more to self-vote and is the equivalent of 100% curation rewards as I’ve demonstrated above. I’ll just copy and paste trafalgar’s comment on it:-
Hi
I know you have proposed changing the author/curator split before, as the first step in changing the economical model here on Steemit. I think you have the knowledge and/or connections to people who could execute my proposed solution to this problem, so I hope you don’t mind me sharing it with you here.
I think solution to this issue, at least a theoretic one, can be accomplished by using partially existing infrastructure and rules, and also taking advantage of an existing capability in Steemit code, which would allow people to choose to change this split themselves.
After I read this post, I studied some of the existing graphic interfaces and I found that some of the existing sharing features on Steem-plus and some other graphic user interfaces on other platforms allow people to change the sharing of rewards on their specific posts to 50/50 percentage of the authors rewards with a single named beneficiary.
Since the number of beneficiaries and the way the term beneficiaries is defined is written into the code underlying the graphic user interface, it is in theory possible to redefine beneficiary in other terms, such as beneficiary equals user who comments on my post or beneficiary equals user who upvotes my post. After that the code would define the math formula or algorithm which determines the amount paid to this newly defined “beneficiary”. Most developers would use the existing code found in the Git Hub library for this algorithm and not rewrite that portion of the code.
I would suggest incentivizing a developer with JavaScript JS experience to write a code modifying one of these interfaces.
In fact, it would be interesting to find out if a developer has already worked on some code to achieve this goal, i.e. a way to change the author/curator split and the code is stored on someone’s Github site.
The final pice of such a code would connect to Steemconnect similarly as we do now when defining interactions between our Posting authority and the Steem Blockchain and especiallywhen defining interactions between our wallet and the Steem Blockchain.
I think that in theory this could be done, and it would not require special permissions from Steemit, inc, as it requires only user granted permissions to change the split for an individual user.
I hope I have summarized the problem correctly and explained my proposal clearly. If not please contact me.
@shortsegments