RE: Bloggers: Would you mind sharing 50/50 with those that upvote you?
It is the stake that is in the hands of the users who participate here
They have nothing to lose! If you are relying on their votes to support your projects, they will be no worse off because they would simply get higher curation rewards on their own votes! If they don't want that reward, they can donate it back to your projects. What is the problem? (Another way of looking at it: Those supporting voters will see their stake and influence grow as those higher curation rewards increase their SP. Again, this does not seem like something which should concern you.)
In reality I strongly suspect that you are relying on more stakeholder votes than just a closed subcommunity, and you will indeed see (and are seeing) rewards being drawn away. (Actually this can happen anyway, despite your claims otherwise, by increased external vote power participation in the pool.)
Either that or you are somehow benefiting from self voting and/or vote selling and your objections are all based on disguised self-interest. I didn't want to think that but your apparent unwillingness to accept obvious economic arguments must call to mind the famous quote:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it -Upton Sinclair
But that's not an accusation, I don't know. Your attitude on this is oddly closed minded, that is all.
The problem, as I keep trying to explain, is that you are forcing me to distribute less value to others and thus have less impact on the rest of the system. It's exactly the opposite of your points above. I don't want more money. I don't want my project to make more money. That is not its goal. It explicitly does not ask for support from its users, and until recently we haven't gotten much from outside stakeholders either. (And apart from Curie Support the outside votes are from a few minnows.) It is me spending my money to have influence on the future stake distribution on this platform. Me getting more money when my users get less is a hindrance.
I'm happy to list my interests in those areas if you'd like. I'm not here hiding anything. They aren't significant but really none of my financial stake on Steem is significant. I've spent more on SM than I ever have on any non-gambling game, I guess maybe that counts, relatively.
I think what you're failing to understand here is that my interest in Steem is almost entirely non-financial. So you can make all the financial arguments you want and it isn't going to make much of a difference. As long as you're a threat to my non-financial goals - and you are, look around at all of the users this proposal is upsetting, it's hardly just me - you could be handing me hundred-dollar bills and it wouldn't matter.
When you hyper-prioritize economics you're attacking everyone who has an extrinsic reason to be here, and those are precisely the users who are of highest value in both the short and the long term.
That's ironic because you are arguing over a 33% reduction in author rewards in the favor of curators. Not even a 50% reduction certainly not a 100% reduction, but a 33% reduction. Someone making $1.50 still gets to make $1 (all else being equal, which of course we all know it is not).
If that isn't hyper-prioritizing economics I don't know what is. If you have extrinsic and non-financial goals then how is this sort of change all that big a deal anyway? The extrinsic and non-monetary goals aren't affected at all.
I'm making no accusations against you, I'm just trying to understand this hypersensitivity on what is clearly a relatively small change as part of a broader goal which would almost certainly benefit your stake-distribution efforts to at least some degree (offsetting at least some of the above 33%).
You have elsewhere stated you are going to power down and cash out in case this change is put into effect. Now please explain to me how your users getting possibly 33% less (which I imagine, being the intelligent and creative person that you are, you could certainly figure out some way to make up) is a huge, gigantic problem, when them getting 100% less because you have cashed out and left is not.
Because 33% less is a lie? You can't look at one post when the whole reward system is recursive, and 33% less compounded weekly turns out to be a hell of a lot.
See this post for how much this really hurts metacuration efforts. We're talking about 60% less total distribution to lower-level accounts over five years. That sucks.
Also, I will hard-resist non-consensual rewards changes for as long as I'm here just on principle.
It is certainly not that and your inflammatory and mistaken rhetoric is not helpful. A reduction from 75% to 50% is a 33% reduction. Period. If you want to argue on the basis of long term compounding (with a bunch of unstated assumptions), then why is 75% even a good starting point at all? Why not 80% or 100%.
There is nothing about the status quo that is optimal. It's just a somewhat arbitrary set up that we have based on a series of (often poorly-considered) decisions that got us here.
Also, if you really, really want to give away more of your stake, why don't you just use the transfer function and do so? Isn't that what you were suggesting with UI-assisted curation. No one is stopping you.
There have been countless rewards changes. I'd guess roughly half of the 20 hard forks have involved some form of rewards changes. Why are those okay, but somehow we have to stop right here and future ones are not? It's all a work in progress. I'm pretty sure you will find yourself in a very extreme minority if you claim that the current set of reward pool rules and mechanisms is ideal and should never change.
It's almost like I used an adjective there or something. Once you have a significant user-base, when you iterate it has to be with the consent of the users you're affecting, or you alienate them and destroy your growth. But you seem to be totally interested in forcing user growth with spurious economic theories rather than actually doing anything to support the people who are already engaging in the behaviors you want to see.
I've seen this a lot in organizations: they're blessed with a strong crop of early adopters, because early adoption tends to be when driven, dynamic people arrive. And they decide that they can just throw them by the wayside because there will always be more.
There won't always be more. However much you optimize your algorithm the people you are attacking now will never be replaceable.
You mean non-consensual? I'm not sure how that works.
All of the forks are voted by stakeholders via witness votes (and by mechanism that requires a super-majority of 17 or 18 witnesses; in practice it is usually all). It's pretty likely there was at least one stakeholder aka user dissenter for every hard fork (for whatever reason, rational or otherwise). In fact the last fork had one well-known witness and significant stakeholder who dissented. So in that sense none of them are non-consensual and all of them are.
Some blockchains (Bitcoin best known of course) have an ethos of essentially never making these sorts of changes, on the theory that the benefits of (just about) any changes is always outweighed by the cost of disruption. Steem does not have that. If we wanted it, okay, but suddenly choosing this half-baked setup as the switching point seems bizarre at best. That said, I'm sympathetic to the position of not making changes when their benefits are not clear and significant. In this case we probably disagree on that conclusion.
(For one thing, I would point out that there isn't any growth so we can't "destroy [y]our growth" as you suggest. There are many signups but attrition is such that the active user base is not growing. There are real problems here that need to be solved by real improvements. Trying to protect what we have, be that user base or (non-) growth, is not enough.)
Maybe this change will or won't happen, but there will certainly be more. They will or won't be non-consensual depending on your perspective as discussed above.