RE: Bloggers: Would you mind sharing 50/50 with those that upvote you?
No that's not really the entire argument. I would refer you back to the @kevinwong and @trafalgar posts. They lay out an argument in greater length and detail then we can sensibly do in comments. I've rehashed some of that in my replies but not all of it.
Let me try to summarize a different way. The goal has nothing to do with how much is paid to individual users and more a matter of system health. It is is to shift the incentives system-wide so that self-voting and vote selling are no longer economically incentivized. There are of course broader long-term goals that that, but that's a minimum starting point because as long as they are so strongly incentivized they result in a race to the bottom where none of your initiatives such as meta-curation, UI-based redistribution, etc. will work because as more and more of the reward pool is drawn away by those broken incentives it then becomes inaccessible to you (and everyone else). That's where we have been heading and the race to the bottom continues.
"Self-voting and vote selling are no longer economically incentivized" so you basically want to remove freedom and implement some communist control system for what people do with their stake. That is what it sounds like. Just skip that idea. Let people have their freedom. People invested let them use their stake freely. If people want to self vote let them do it. As long as not something goes crazy. There are always extremes.
Okay so you look at people self vote. But you are completely missing the other side of how many that gives in a selfless way without any ROI focus every single second. You are basically looking at human nature and want to try to fix it. Selfish people will be selfish in any system you do. People reflect themselves. I see love and beauty on Steem Blockchain since I follow selfless people.
It's not the system we are dealing with. It's human nature. Most value for let's say dtube video creators is not coming from high Stake holders. They want to leech 50% off the big value that dtube gives to real content creators. Since the Steem share out was a mess in 2016 it will take 5 years to make things more balanced to real content creators. The real truth is majority of people are just not good content creators and never will be. So they are confused about their role here. So they want to leech 50% from people that are amazing.
I have a better solution before any radical changes are being done. First people need to wait for a niche + community system. Where people do solid content for specific niches. So everyone get's what they want. A moderator system for specific niches would be good. Narrative is trying this. At the moment most people are just derping around creating whatever. People that wants to thrive needs to find their niche and use a solid content strategy.
Radical changes ---> Usually someone is unhappy in life. Radically change something will never work. Most high Stake holders needs to find a project or something they can invest their life into. Instead of trying to leech off of content creators. Content creators have more leverage than Stake holders in the long run. Since they have limitless supply of original content.
How much comes from misterdelegation
There are a few main sources exactly. There is not enough high Stake holders for a 50/50 system. The leverage is already concentrated. The majority is content creators. Not a few select Stake holders. That will say any change would only favour a minority. Not the majority of content creators.
Currently @nathanmars is the person that has done the most to empower people after @misterdelegation
Empower 1000 accounts with 10,000 SP each would only take 10 million SP. But it's up to Steemit Inc how they want to do all of that. But 1000 real content creators would move waters. You have a middle class fixed instantly with that. STEEM sitting idle is an opportunity cost.
The more hands it's in the more upvotes --> The more it will make moves in the whole Internet. 1000 empowered creators. Leverage content creators is the biggest leverage you can have. Individual high level stake holders can never do this. Needs to come from higher ups.
In end it comes down to get STEEM into people that are the best to leverage it into higher possibilities with proof-of-brain. And not all are the same in their skills to leverage stuff. Some people can make 1 million people to follow them. So some are amazing at leverage. Others not.
I will strongly disagree with that. There are literally hundreds of users here building projects because we believe that we have a path to success. I am 100% confident that mine will be fine if you stop attacking it.
The reward pool that matters cannot be "drawn away" but it can be driven away. It is the stake that is in the hands of the users who participate here because they want to participate here, and as long as that subset of the reward pool continues to grow, what happens to the rest of it really doesn't matter.
Those users should be supported, not attacked. You're a much larger threat to that right now than anything else.
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.