Reward Pool is under 1Million Steem
Here's a recent picture from the reward pool. Look at all that beautiful steem flowing over the dam. I'm not sure it's done equilabrating yet, but the reward pool stands at 983k steem. That's about half of what it was before HF19 took effect. I'm glad to see that minnow votes are worth more, but I'm not sure the tradeoff so far has been worth it. In addition to the following concerns we've shoved 1million steem into the already biggest authors. Not a huge fan of that either. I guess I missed the steemitblog announcement where the reward pool would be cut substantially by the recent hard fork.
Pros
- Minnow Votes were 50x more, but with the reward pool cut in half it's now down to 25x
Cons
Minnows don't get a slider and only get 10 votes a day, so they have to use full power votes each time. It drains their power if they want to go above upvoting a few of their own posts, upvoting the handful of comments they like, and upvoting a few other peoples posts. Then it starts draining, and that's cutting down on minnow/minnow interactions from what I can observe (haven't dug into more data yet, just first observations)
Views are down. Not sure if it was just a spike in rewards and then a fall, or truly the 40 votes --> 10 votes has disincentivized finding new content, but again from observation it looks like overall views are down especially on minnow posts.
Autovorotic behavior. Peeps are self voting at all an all time high. Sure, I guess it's your right to do with your steem power as you seem fit, but upvoting spammy shitty comments buried in low view pages doesn't seem like a good use of a community asset even if that portion was yours to spend. Comment voting is up about 9X from what I can tell. Pretty sure it's not newly engaged curating whale suddenly supporting lots of new comments from minnnows there.
The percentage of the reward pool seems to have increased on the top accounts. Trending is mostly the same faces, but now those faces get an even larger portion of the pool. That can't be good. Like the world needs another mechanism to shove rewards to the highest earners.
Minnows don't get a slider and only get 10 votes a day, so they have to use full power votes each time. It drains their power if they want to go above upvoting a few of their own posts, upvoting the handful of comments they like, and upvoting a few other peoples posts. Then it starts draining, and that's cutting down on minnow/minnow interactions from what I can observe (haven't dug into more data yet, just first observations)
Views are down. Not sure if it was just a spike in rewards and then a fall, or truly the 40 votes --> 10 votes has disincentivized finding new content, but again from observation it looks like overall views are down especially on minnow posts.
Autovorotic behavior. Peeps are self voting at all an all time high. Sure, I guess it's your right to do with your steem power as you seem fit, but upvoting spammy shitty comments buried in low view pages doesn't seem like a good use of a community asset even if that portion was yours to spend. Comment voting is up about 9X from what I can tell. Pretty sure it's not newly engaged curating whale suddenly supporting lots of new comments from minnnows there.
The percentage of the reward pool seems to have increased on the top accounts. Trending is mostly the same faces, but now those faces get an even larger portion of the pool. That can't be good. Like the world needs another mechanism to shove rewards to the highest earners.
So, look. Can you describe HF19 as good or bad objectively? No, it's subjective. I want to growth hack steemit and help minnows grow. I don't think this hardfork is ultimately helping there because more of the rewards pool is going to top accounts than before and systemic abuse is on the rise. Minnow votes are worth more, but it's not enough to drastically alter their fate especially with the change in viewership. A short term spike in your ability to upvote isn't beneficial compared to the long term benefits of viewership, better peer-to-peer interaction in the comments section, and making friends with your power rather than the inclination to horde it post hard fork. If you're looking for more liberty on how you spend your own steem power though even for shit reasons then I guess it's a win.
I'm still confused why we don't just allow 1 vote to take all the steem power for all eternity and power that into one giant vote... That would surely help.
I think HF19 was a backend hack to try to unfuck the real problem on the platform which is distribution. Without even including @steemit the top 1% of accounts have 93% of the steem. That's the real issue. HF18 rules would be working fine if so much of the power wasn't in the hands of just a small minority of people.
It never will even out, but I do hope to see it become more distributed.
There are much more viewers than content creators.
Since there's money involved, some will game the system to get as much profit for as little effort as possible. This is new though and intended to give the profit to those who really put in some effort, and provide value. It will take time to grow the community and balance things out.
Most posts only get 10-20 views on steemit though, do you really think there's too many viewers?
Definitely not too many viewers. Need lots more. It's the way it is. Viewing is easier and more entertaining than creating. Need those viewers to participate more too. Eventually they will
Good comment.
Oh my god! It's almost as if this was predicted! Maybe people will start listening to informed criticisms now?
Nah...better to pretend that a certain few devs are always right and everything is perfect!
Thank you @aggroed...I noticed this after the first week. If you all had not started PAL, we would pretty much be algae food.
My goal here was to learn about currencies, and then possibly invest some, but I have to really think on it...
I have seen comments rewards drop... but maybe it is me and what I say,or how I say it... :-0
I know I am less inclined to use my votes on comment's ,as I would rather reward authors who are putting in real effort(?) or that catch my ADD vission.. wow pretty!,thats cool!...
hopefully HF20 or 21 can give us some votes back!!!
but
NOT! or maybe I should teach my kid how to lie steal and cheat because it works... raise a politician!
sorry I see it as wrong for 1% to have 99%... I was taught to share,help those less fortunate than me...
why I am part of MSP! and P.A.L. net!
thank you for all you do @aggroed!
namaste!
I must say i agree with alot of your toughts, i was here only the last weeks of HF19, but that time felt more rewarding for me as a minnow, had a lot more views and the few comments I got back then, where usually real input, and not just "follow me" spam.
It felt good to have a little more to give to people on a upvote, but then again it constraints me that I now have to keep a close eye on my voting power. For me the community and the different areas I feel I can learn more from trough other posts have gotten so much harder to connect with. The influx of new users with the reward pool changing has led to a lot of spam, which makes it harder to find quality writers. We can only see what will happen, but I predict that hf20 will arrive soon, atleast if someone is reading the feedback. the distribution problem is quite big, but can be managed over time. As you say, peer-peer interaction is worth alot more!
Yeah, so, HF20 fixes a different set of problems entirely. I haven't really started paying attention to that yet. I'm still kinda stuck here watching long term sustaibable growth for the minnows in the Pond I help build deteriorate for short term short sighted gains.
The decentralized system on steemit is pretty much a good reflection of our current world reality. Unless something is done to "level" the playing field for minnows, good authors will eventually be disincentivized to continue to blog. Eventually, spamming will hurt the community.
Hope that HF20 will bring about some much needed "regulation."
I guess the best solution now is to not follow spammy authors and hold back the need for instant Steem gratification.
When is HF20 expected to be initiated ?
I can't speak technically as elegant as you, however, I totally agree with your view point. At the end of the day, we'll have the same or less 'power' as before the HF19.
I quoted you in a response to the Old Dog @kus-knee with this "The percentage of the reward pool seems to have increased on the top accounts. Trending is mostly the same faces, but now those faces get an even larger portion of the pool. That can't be good. Like the world needs another mechanism to shove rewards to the highest earners."
Well, I'm stoked to see a user with a rediculously high rep chime in here looking at what may not have been the best plan after all. Thanks for commenting @gringalicious and thanks for your continued support. You're great!
I normally never chime in on these discussions. I'd much rather focus on frosting and raspberries, ( did I happen to mention that raspberries are my favorite? ). BUT, I am put out by the fact that I can't focus on my raspberries, instead, I have to figure this shit out every couple of months. If you want to give some 'power' to the minnows, how about trying to maintain some constant parameters?!
I need to find my happy place apparently - LOL
Yeah, it's all an experiment, and I hope they figure out something that really works for the vast majority without all this self upvoting shit post spam before they try to charge at reddit for real.
This is the key thing. Every hard fork, people should be all over adjusting to the changes and be charitable to everyone and their intentions because until we get everything right EVERY SINGLE HF WILL BE BROKEN. This is all transient. Every Steemian should explore every aspect of every new HF X, we should see what doesn't work, we should fix it thoughtfully in HF X+1, no one should get up in arms or freak out, and we should move on together, rinse lather repeat. There's no steady state yet.
There is a dynamic that seems to come with any change - unintended consequences. Looks like we have a couple with the latest HF. So long as there is more pros than cons at the end of the day, change is good. I guess that is the question then.
I agree with this post. I don't have much experience prior to HF19 but I can definitely tell there's a big difference, especially in morale. I think that's the biggest problem here.
I also appreciate that his is one of the first big person's post that doesn't just outright "blame" minnows. There's been a lot of minnow blame and it makes for an unfriendly environment.
I really enjoy your commentary and analysis of the important issues going on, be it hard forks or revenge downvotes.
Steemit is a massive social experiment playing out in real time and we are all part of it.
Glad to have your thoughts building up our collective crypto-dna
You nailed it again @aggroed! I agree with your analysis and I felt really constrained by the 10 votes per day limit, I had to power up and today I finally got the vote slider!