HF 19- The Clu$terf*ckening and Unintended Consequences

in #hf198 years ago (edited)

HF 19 as it stands will either be bad or horrible from my perspective. These hardforks aren't inherently good or bad. It depends on what your goals are. I don't think this hardfork will accomplish my goals of growing the platform or supporting minnows. This is ironic because I think the hardfork is meant to do those things, but this is the story of unintended consequences. Needless to say, in the short term I don't like it.

Perceived HF19 intentions

The hardfork is designed to improve the outgoing rewards pool distribution and that may happen to a small extent in limited areas. It's meant to improve the usage of curation benefits and do a better job of capturing their rewards. It might do that too. However; those benefits will be massively outweighed by clustering of author rewards, which will drain ~60% of the reward pool into just 10-20 accounts (unless there is a massive manual intervention). I see that as bad. Maybe you don't... but I think it's bad.

That said, if it fails like I think it will then the blowback will help. If I'm wrong so be it. I've been wrong before. I got over it then too. If users go to extraordinary efforts to manually unfuck this thing it may appear to have worked, but only because some power users took things into their own hands. Like a lot of things around here it's up to the whales and the Witnesses they upvote to determine how this place works. Excited to see how things turn out about 1-2 months after it's implemented.

What do I want?

I want this place to grow. Pure and simple.

The world is run by immoral banksters that cause harm. Protesting isn't going to change it. Getting on the inside isn't going to change it. We gotta provide an alternative to the shitty economic system they have created and get a mass adoption going. If we can do that, then we can change the world.

I'm personally motivated to do this because the immoral banksters own the pharma companies and the research dollars involved in cancer research. Cures are known. Causes are known. We can end the cancer epidemic tomorrow if leaders stopped promoting cancer studies akin to tobacco science and talk extensively about the Race to the Cause instead of the Race to the Cure. It would be great if they start promoting actual cures instead of high priced medicines that cause further harm.

I'm a PhD scientist, I've done extensive research. I know about the mainstream studies. I've read them. I don't believe them anymore. They're lying and the research is fraudulent, and now I have a dead mother, two dead uncles, and a variety of family members missing their organs and a fat chunk of change because of it. Eventually, I'll probably die from cancer too. I have limited time to fix this place so my kids might have it better. I want this whole system to change, and I think Steemit could do it.

That's where I'm coming from.

Stakeholders

Who are the stakeholders here?

Whales
Merchants
Everyone Else

I'm not anti-whale or anti-merchant. They are important groups. But I'm a populist anyway and want to see this place grow and that means focusing on the needs of new users and lower power users to train, retain, and grow them. If I can do that I have a shot at changing the world. Seems like a worthy effort. This is why I've worked so hard since becoming a Witness 3 weeks ago to get a 500 person Discord channel going, get a 110k SP bot running to get them started, get the Minnow Support Project contests up and running, send a kid and his Dad to Steemfest and wrote a shit ton of Steemit tips articles.

fuck socialism

93% of the steem rests in 1% of the users. That's excluding the @steemit account. If you include @steemit it's basically all the steem in like 100 accounts.

I hate the distribution, but I'm a libertarian/anarchist so the plan shouldn't be to take from whales to give to minnows, but to gently guide a rewards pool distribution that incents helping baby accounts get wealthier.

What the fuck does all that have to do with HF 19

Here are the things that are important about the next Hardfork

Programmed-
Linear Rewards
Voting Pool use per vote
Rewards Pool Distribution Percentage

Current status-
SP distribution
Rewards Pool Distribution and the trending page
Witness settings

Social-
Whale non-voting experiment

The 3 most important aspects of the upcoming HF

Voting pool usage change
Whale experiment
Linear Rewards

Where do we stand today

Distribution Picture-

Rewards Pool Distribution Picture- 72% of future rewards going to authors

Author rewards pool

What will the hardfork do?

Let's start with Linear rewards. Linear Rewards is designed to fix curation. Curation is actually the wrong place to start. It's only 12% of the rewards pool distribution, and this tweak will at best be a 15% change to it. So overall a max of a 1.8% shift to distribution.

We can't talk about linear rewards all by itself because it's not actually the most important question. We have to talk about it in conjunction with the whale non-voting experiment.

I've created a fairly simple model. HF 18 non-voting whales, HF 18 voting whales, HF 19 non-voting whales, and HF 19 voting whales. The problem with simple models is that they aren't quite accurate and mine is no exception. What I've tried to do is think of 4 people voting on a post and trying to figure out what kinds of rewards they are going to get. This isn't an exact science, but I'm pretty comfortable with what I'm looking at in the first pass.

4 curators in a whales voting scenario
A mega Whale with 800,000 SP
A whale with 50,000 SP
A dolphin with 13500 SP
A minnow with 1200 SP

I've also done a whales not voting scenario. I know some whales are currently voting even in the non-voting experiment so it isn't perfect. That's why I bumped my normal whales value up beyond 50k but didn't include my mega whale who likely isn't actually voting all that much.

4 curators in a whales voting scenario
A muted mega Whale with 0 SP
A whale with 80,000 SP
A dolphin with 13500 SP
A minnow with 1200 SP

Then I thought ok. Let's imagine 4 different posts all go up to around $3k. It doesn't matter who authored them. They all vote on the same post around the 30 minute mark. I'm going to ignore the order for a second though I know it matters, but we need a simple model. Now imagine that there's $120 worth of rewards to split just between those 4 curators. Who gets what under the 4 cases?

Here's how it shakes out-

HF 18 No experiment mega whale gets 99.5% of the 120 bucks
HF 18 with experiment whale gets 97.2% of the 120 bucks
HF 19 no experiment whale gets 93%
HF 19 with experiment whale get 84%

The flat out most fair way to do this is HF 19 no experiment, but of these 4 options HF 19 with the experiment will do the most to encourage new users to come here. Through some combination of the benevolance of mega whales and likely increase in user base if whales continue not voting thus leading to a price increase I hope Linear Rewards goes through and the experiment continues. But that's small potatoes....

The future SP distribution is driven by author rewards

Look at how the rewards pool is paid out.

72% to Authors
13% to curators
7% to interest
5% to witnesses
2% to commentors

It shouldn't take a genius to figure out how to make a better overall distribution and grow this place. We tweak those categories.

  1. Commenters... it's not worth dealing with

  2. Witness pay isn't massive compared to what they have to do... maybe trim when the price goes up... but especially if competition goes up for these spots and people fight for the positions then we will actually get our money's worth out of the witness pool.

  3. Interest should be at 0%. Why we're paying 7% of the reward pool to SBD interest is a bit of a mystery to me. I'm worried it's based on legacy policies that haven't been updated for like a year by some top 49 witness accounts that are driving percent interest above 0% and forcing the community to give a bunch of SP to SBD holders where it's really not necessary. Either they change or we vote them down in power and we can recapture a lot if not all of this 7%.

  4. Curators... Linear rewards and the experiment will tweak this... but it's net effect at best is about a 15% change on 12% or at best about 1.8% difference in curation rewards pool distribution... This isn't a holy grail.

  5. Author rewards- This is where it's at baby!!!

How do we point author rewards to growth?

Look at author rewards distribution now.

I can't integrate this data, but if I squint I think I see about 90% of the author rewards going to 8% of the authors. I know that's covered in the white paper, but I think it's too much. I think it's bad for the platform. Should top posters earn more than shit posters yes. Should it be that much? No. Why? Because it sucks for new users. This is subjective, but the current distribution isn't meeting the needs of new users.

I have a unique position running a group for ~500 minnows to know some of what they are struggling with. Yes it's only been 4 days, but I've only been a dolphin for about a month. I've been a minnow recently for about 10 months. So, I'm feeling kinda clued in.

They aren't sitting there talking about how fucked they are that they aren't maximizing their 2 cents a day of curation rewards. They are pissed that they can't get shit for authoring.

Curation has a built in slow growth curve for minnows. If you can't make a big bet on a post you can't get paid out even if it goes pure huge. So, minnow curation is kinda fucked. The most hope a minnow has for money is droppin' memes in whale comment's sections or hoping that 1 post actually catches a whale upvote. But there isn't a growth cap on authoring, so that's the best chance to make mega rewards for minnows and dolphins and seeing that all the rewards are going to the same ~30 authors every week makes that difficult to bear.

What's the 4x change in voting going to do?

It's going to concentrate votes even more on an even slimmer number of authors. If you think the reward pool is getting drained now by the same people over and over it's going to be 4 times worse. Why? because that's how you maximize curation.

I run @minnowsupport bot which is a newly minted whale account. 500 people autovote themselves about 1000 times a day. The curation rewards are shit because the posts don't get big because it's still largely ignored minnows we are talking about.

Instead take for example a recent 1 click $700 payout for a whale curating a big post. If you bet big on the posts that go huge you get a fat fucking stack.

I get why this was put in place. It was an incentive to upvote the best content and the assumption was that if more people upvote it then it's better content. That's not how this works in reality though. The goal for a serious curation maximizer is just to upvote the thing most likely to go huge and there's a steady predictable place to put that vote... then FUCK YEAH. that's guarenteed money! At $700 for 1 click you have way too much incentive to pig pile and not search out good content.

Now, imagine instead of placing a $50 bet on a post I get to place a $200 dollar bet on the post. My gains will get even larger. The posts will get even larger. My curation as a whale could be $2800 on a single post.... as the fucking curator!

The trending page is going to be filled with $12000 posts, but everyone else won't get shit because all the power will be in those 10-20 posts probably by the exact same authors every day. It's because curation is gamed to maximize rewards rather than used as designed to upvote the best content.

What's the takehome

If you're not a top author you're about to get fucked by HF 19, and it's gonna stall growth or shrink this platform. Linear rewards is barely perceptible. If the experiment stops it's gonna be even worse. This is a bad fucking plan. That said. It's good to run this expriment to show it's a bad fucking plan and when the trending page is 12k in a week and a half and everyone starts leaving we can go the opposite direction to tweak distribution to favor growth on the platform.

How do we tweak to grow the platform?

  1. Get rid of curation bonuses for pig piling.
  2. Spread out voting power to 80 votes instead of shrinking to 10
  3. Keep the non-voting whale experiment going
  4. Implement linear rewards
  5. Witnesses change SBD percent interest to 0 or you remove your witness vote on them
  6. Incent whales to upvote minnows by using less power or having a better rewards curve when they do

Help the people running and participating in the Minnow Support Project.

Let's hope I'm wrong. If I'm right let's work collectively to steer the ship on a different tack. If I'm wrong point and laugh and we'll all joke about this a month from now.

https://steemit.com/minnowsupportproject/@minnowsupport/updated-governance-organization-ranks-channels-and-plans-for-the-minnow-support-project

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I don't think you're right but this a great critique and I look forward to you following and critiquing the effects of the HF as we observe them in real-time. Nice work.

Yeah - it's important to remember that this HF, like all of the ones before it, it part of a greater experiment in which the blockchain collects the data and results.

If it sucks, we'll change it.

Once again, this is not how the Steem curation landscape ever was and ever will be. You're assuming that everyone is voting at the same rate, it was never like this. Out of the Top 1% very few ever vote, and earlier it was only a dozen of them that were dominating 99% of the reward pool using less than 10% of the stake.

Even with your own numbers, minnows gain 50 times more influence with HF19 with no experiment versus HF18 with experiment. That's not a fair comparison, as the experiment is just that. Better compare like for like. Feel free to simulate actual historical voting data on the blockchain for a meaningful comparison. Everything else is irrelevant. (Edit - the experiment is not sustainable as it is important for there to be an incentive for large SP holders. Many of whom have powered down during the experiment, by the way.)

With linear rewards, the piling on effect is no longer there, and the top authors will lose out dramatically. The curation rewards are quadratic which in fact heavily discourages piling on votes. Those who are early gain most of the curation rewards, while late voters fight for scraps. That's why curators are heavily incentivized to find new, undiscovered posts to vote on, instead of posts by top authors.

The lower voting power target will have negative short term consequences, but even that further spreads out rewards far and wide once the platform grows and the Subcommunities feature takes off. The age of power curators are over. The target will of course be need to be adjusted upwards as the platform grows.

As others have pointed out, SBD interest has been 0% for months now.

In short, most of your concerns are misplaced.

Upvoted with 10% strength for visibility as we don't want unnecessary FUD and panic.

Also, dont' get me wrong. This is a policy that we may disagree on, but I think ultimately having you on the platform is great for the platform. I admire what you do, and am grateful for your work. I'm also grateful for your time and consideration on this issue. I've prepared some coffee cake for you this morning. You can share it with @donkeypong if you so choose. I'm honored to have you both come visit my wall.

I saw your earlier post. I read it and it sparked this one. I think you're quite bright, but I think you're wrong here. In your post you were comparing whale A to Whale B and seeing that it shrank. Turns out it doesn't matter. What matters is compairng Whale A to Diver A and Whale B to Diver B. That first ratio is 99:1. The second is about 93:1. It's not going to have the dramatic effect you think it's going to have. That's a ~6% shift.

As for a giant increase... it's kinda like I promise to pay you 20 cents an hour instead of 1 cent. Yes, that's a 20x increase, but you still wouldn't want ot live on it.

I hope I'm wrong. If I'm not we'll see it soon. The Kings of the ring should have a 12k post in record time. If you see that I'd ask you suggest we pull the plug. Maybe this will all be swell. It's really hard to model all the variables, but my back of the envelope calculation says that 40 -> 10 is trading a small gain in curation benefits for a massive clusterfuck in authoring.

For the third time, your assumption that everyone votes at the same rate is wrong. It's well known most whales never or rarely voted, even before the experiment. Besides, @steemit owns 40% of the stake and they never, ever vote. The Steemwhales picture you post accounts for estimated value, where poloniex and bittrex hold large proportions of liquid assets which are irrelevant for voting.

But let's assume that's the case, and I'll use your numbers. We'll compare HF19 no experiment with HF18 no experiment, like for like.

800K SP tier - 99.5824% vs 93%. That's a decrease of 6% as you correctly point out.
50K SP tier - 0.398% vs 6%. That's a 15x gain in influence.
13.5K SP tier - 70x gain in influence.
1.2K SP tier - 500x gain in influence.

Once again, remember that whales vote much less than dolphins and minnows, so these numbers are very flawed too. But even with these numbers it's very easy to see how minnows' influence will grow by orders of magnitudes. (Edit - I don't have the numbers, but a developer can simulate it. My guess is 10% of the stake was previously dominating 90% of the rewards; now they will get 30% or something like that. Minnows will gain 1000x influence, dolphins will gain 100x. Those are just guesses given my understanding of the curation landscape.)

There'll be no 12k post. With linear rewards that'd need 1/4th of all staked votes in a day to vote on a single post. Currently that's possible with 1/16th the votes, but after HF19 it will be much harder. It's really clear how linear rewards work, there's no scope for disagreement or "we'll see it soon". We know how this will turn out.

PS: I guess you didn't read my post beyond the opening image, I clearly compared Whale B vs Diver B.

How do we define the term Whale?
At what point does a Dolphin evolve into a Whale?
Or is it just completely relative?

One thing I noticed about Steem Power, was it is easy to buy some, if you care about curating, and making better payback on your time to post.

Even purchasing 10 SP could make a huge difference in your experience, as far as value for your time.
That is motivational, but ONLY for those that really want to participate.

Looks like most Whales really want to have power on the platform but rarely use it..
and are willing to risk not being able to access it all for a few months, in return for being able to heavily influence the community from time to time.

I HEAVILY QUESTION IF WE WANT a platform that attracts many posters that only want to game the system by posting crap and making money from it.

What shows initiative and creativity is being willing to invest in the platform enough that their content is seen and their curation efforts are paid well.

My experience:
a) Joined up, posted a few things. Nobody saw it, no comments.
b) Purchased some SP.
c) Seeing that my voting power was something that carried weight now, it further MOTIVATED ME to participate in the platform.

You state "One thing I noticed about Steem Power, was it is easy to buy some, if you care about curating, and making better payback on your time to post.

Even purchasing 10 SP could make a huge difference in your experience, as far as value for your time.
That is motivational, but ONLY for those that really want to participate."

No. It's only motivational for those that have the financial wherewithal to participate by buying Steem Power.

You seem utterly unaware that 3 billion people live on less than $3/day. Seeing that chart @aggroed posted and the nearly complete acquisition of all the rewards of posting by a handful of posters should give you pause.

It did me. Why should I invest $10 for zero return? Look at this chart and tell me that's a good investment.

authorrewardchart.png

I converted Ethereum to buy SP.

I'm here for the long haul, regardless of the money.

As far as I'm concerned, the biggest advantage to Steemit, irrespective of the shit people always pull, is the fact that here, I don't get saddled with the job of polishing someone else's turds.

I only have to worry about my own.

"There'll be no 12k post" Liberosist, 2017

We can revisit this comment in a couple weeks.

I'm a fan of linear rewards. I'm suggesting we implement it.

I hate the 40-->10 vote thing.

Something really confused me today.

I keep reading, that at present time ( prior HF19) one single upvote worth is EXPONENTIAL, depending on SP. Which in few hours is going to be changed into LINEAR
I just checked the "worth of upvote" values for 8 different whales-dolphins-minnows, from steemdollar.com , starting from the top, and in the decreasing steps of x10 times each. And here is what i got:

This seems quite linear, right?

Ten times more SP = ten times more value in one upvote.
How it can be?

What I am missing?

@aggroed , @ausbitbank , @timcliff - or anyone else can clarify this?

that's teh SP, but in squared rewards you would multiply that by tiself. 71x71 to calculate rewards shares.

Wow, quite in depth there @aggroed. I knew HF 19 was coming but didn't realise quite how much of a big change this will have. You are very right, we get questions every day in the Discord chat about low payouts for very good posts. There is only so much as a minnow that we can do other than resteem their post in the hopes that it will get more exposure and hopefully a small percentage of an upvote from a whale for them.

If you are correct in your assessment then I am worried for a lot of newer members: there just won't be the incentive to keep going for them. I will stick it out regardless - while important the monetary rewards are secondary to the community I have surrounded myself with and the community you introduced me to.

I hope you are wrong, for their sakes.

I encourage you to make a weekly post about underappreciated/underrated posts. I will happily follow you and evaluate your picks myself and vote up the good stuff.

Thank you! Excellent idea! I will keep you appraised

I'll probably upvote your "underappreciated post summary" post too

Wow, thank you. I will get right on it and let you know!

This 'sticking it out' is fine - until a fair competitor comes along. Steemit is only a vibrant community at present because no such competing platform exists. When it does, Steemit will no longer be a vibrant community, because people seek fairness.

It isn't so much the money, as you point out. It's fairness. I'm not here for money, but to post in a community that doesn't censor posts like Youtube, and Facebook, etc., do.

But the unfair distribution has made money an issue for me, when money just wasn't before.

Yes, I was thinking this too. It seems as a great idea of rewarding people for creating content and for interacting with it but what is the point of rewards if it is not distributed correctly/fairly?! I Think a lot of people are looking for new and different concepts than the usual money making giants of Facebook or YouTube and replacing them with fair systems. Maybe Steemit wasn't intended to be like that.

I might get the wrong impression, I'm only new here, I don't even understand all these terms: whales, dolphins, minnows and the rest. So I'm here to learn more and see where it goes.

I've only been here a month, so there is much yet I don't understand, but the terms you mention refer to the size of the bankroll of the account. Minnows have more than $1000 or so, Dolphins ten times that, and Whales more than $50k. Which makes me plankton at <$100 =p.

One thing I can point out is that of the rewards you can see you are getting for the comment I am replying to, my vote is worth less than $.10. A dolphin, or whale with a lower weighted vote, has upvoted your comment.

HF19 really seems to have made things better, but I haven't yet seen the data on author rewards, which is the majority of rewards. Before the fork, 1% of accounts received 99% of author rewards. Even just an order of magnitude greater spread wouldn't completely create a fair playing field, but it would show a dramatic improvement.

There will be some tendency of rewards to be preferentially concentrated, as content is variable in quality, topic, and based on personal and familial relationships. No algorithm will create a perfect 'communist' distribution, because voting should create a meritocracy, and the people voting will differentiate between content based on merit.

I do know things are better now, except that downvotes are still impacting some people whose content is being reward deprived by parties able to do so (whales) for personal reasons, and this issue hasn't been much addressed in the Hard Fork.

While there is a fairness issue, which is magnified in the perceptions of most people, the fact of rewards being distributed at all is a qualitative change from other platforms. This is markedly demonstrated by the scarcity of trolls, because trolls don't get upvoted, and do get downvoted.

Even folks who are generally unconcerned with the pursuit of wealth don't see much point in deliberately avoiding it, which is what trolling effectively is going to achieve on Steemit. One of the things I love most about Steemit is that the quality of discourse is radically different from other platforms, and I think this is the reason.

It is that difference in quality of communications that most inspires hope in me for Steemit to become more than just a yakbox, but a means of political decision making. I feel that all the pieces are available on Steemit, and just waiting for someone to figger out how to assemble them right.

The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades.

Thanks for your reply.

The bad news is, with little analysis, aggroed prediction is more likely leaning towards being right. The change isn't big but what it shows is HF19 isn't a well thought-out upgrade or one with hidden agendas or on lacking vision or does not help the sustainable growth of the platform and its community. please note: My opinion is based on very little knowledge and understanding of how this actually works** It won't be long though before I figure a lot of it out and will then beable to make a more meaningful contribution.

Your post blew me away. I'm really floored.
Someone with a real mind.

You may be wrong about many things with the HF, but I liked this statement, so I will quote you.
"I'm personally motivated to do this because the immoral banksters own the pharma companies and the research dollars involved in cancer research. Cures are known. Causes are known. We can end the cancer epidemic tomorrow if leaders stopped promoting cancer studies akin to tobacco science and talk extensively about the Race to the Cause instead of the Race to the Cure. It would be great if they start promoting actual cures instead of high priced medicines that cause further harm."

I've looked into this myself; health care is so crooked, it's hard for me to even pay for health insurance. I guess I will, but I rarely let a Dr. inform me of anything without finding my own knowledge on the subject and doing almost anything other than take a phara product for it..

Good health is mostly good habits and looking for new ways to keep healthy; not taking pills.

I also was a grower for some period. And I can read well enough to know that over 100 studies show much evidence for MJ being an incredible medicine; and this fact was known to doctors 100 years ago, and taken from them as a medicine by big pharma.

yeah, MJ cured a million things, got demonized as a snakeoil, and banned through pharma and big chem so they could take a plant you could grow in your backyard away and replace it with patented shit they made in a lab.

I absolutely agree with you concerning the "4x change"!

Let's hope it's ok. Nice to meet you. Thanks for coming on my wall. Here, have some tea and come visit.

Sorry, I fear you got me wrong: I should have written "I absolutely agree with you concerning the "4x change"!
If the most successful authors of the platform can put more voting power in a few single votes, I predict that they will use this additional power to upvote each other. Instead I also plead to favor more but smaller votes, especially as the number of users is growing.
And you are completely right: unfortunately many Steemians don't try to find the best articles (concerning quality, informative content and originality) but instead of that they try to pick posts form 'famous' authors because they expect many others to vote after them.

Btw.: how could you know I like tea? :)

Yeah, I thought we're on the same page, which means it will turn out bad for our goals when the thing launches. So, let's hope and work together to make sure it goes ok.

Who doesn't like tea? You seem very thoughtful and I'm glad to have you here sharing your thoughts. I'm grateful to get to work with you to change the world from 1000 miles away.

1 lump or 2?

What if you recruited more dolphins and fellow witnesses in the cause? A healthy debate could be what we need. I'm in complete agreement over the part about socialism. I don't want to redistribute their wealth to me, I just want better than scraps for the minnows who are busting their buns. It starts here.

yep. Takes time. Workin' on it.

Great minds think alike

Thank you very much for elaborating on HF-19. Very interesting read.

Let's hope this will help minnows as I have already had friends leave because of the current situation. Whatever happens I hope we learn and progress after.

From any policy we have set so far, I think we have a people problem, not a system problem.

  • First, large SP holders should be compensated in some manner for their investment; right now that's through curation
  • The curation model rewards users for "pig piling" (LOL at the term!)
  • SP holders have a legitimate reason to plan their voting to increase ROI
  • Now we are at the question of long term investment in the platform (recruiting more users, and getting good content) versus short term investment (maximizing curation rewards)
  • IMHO opinion, the human tendency is towards short term investment

I don't have any solutions to this quandry, and since I unfortunately don't pay a lot of attention to the hamster wheel turning Steemit, I don't know if what I'm going to suggest has already been proposed and vetted:

Cap the curation reward at a % of Steem power per user per vote; each vote returns the same curation reward regardless of the post value.

It removes the incentive to race for rewards or to "pig pile"

Nicely thought out post, it's got me questioning a recent voting decision I made

You say we should reward large SP holders for their investment. They are rewarded by the increase in value of SP, as the platform becomes worth more, just as any investment in stock is.

We should reward the driver of value in the platform, the authors. Cutting them out is like bailing out banks when people turn upside down in their mortgages. If the authors and curators are rewarded for creating the value of the platform, SP holders are rewarded by the increase in value of their SP, just as banks would be by the ability of people to pay their mortgages.

The current incentivization system on Steemit remarkably resembles TARP, in fact. The little people paying the bills aren't getting a piece of the pie. This kills the pie.

For Steemit to be a Facebook killer, we need a simple system that rewards ordinary people making ordinary posts, because that's what will drive them from Facebook. If Steemit doesn't become a Facebook killer, another platform will, because Facebook needs to be killed.

I'd say that some kind of dividend is necessary to keep folks invested in SP to maintain stability of value.

Participation in the platform is more attractive if Steem is $2 instead of $.14

Then we move to the value of content. Obviously, I think my own content is valuable and should be rewarded...but realistically, my interests and message don't hold value for most people.

Ideally, people who create good content would be fairly rewarded as well, but then we have to think of what the readers value, the existence of vote-exchanging, and the fact that good posts can go unnoticed to begin with due to the now nature of Steemit and the number of posts.

There isn't a foolproof system to do this; it requires human judgement.

Facebook needs to be killed.
Agreed 100%, and I think Steemit and the other front ends do this regardless of payout controversies

Other than the dividend you mention, and I am not dismissive at all of this, I agree completely.

I seek to rectify only the matter of equitable distribution of in platform rewards for creating and curating content. All matters of subjective valuation by people have nothing to do with a dichotomy in wealth creating an unfair system.

Steemit, unless it is perceived as fair by people using it, will suffer no potential to slay giants, and any fair competitor will swiftly replace it, unless it fixes that problem.

Your 100% upvotes on your own posts and comments?

I read that but still don't understand the strategy behind it.

Then again, I don't have a slider bar yet either.

Lately I've been having a difficult time finding quality content to upvote, aside form the usual suspects and they don't post every day.

I'm hoping to build my SP at a faster rate by concentrating my vote on my own work

Please post the results.

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