RE: Hardfork 21 - Steem Proposal System (SPS) + Economic Improvement Proposal (EIP)
This proposal is a steeming pile of hot garbage. You're tinkering around with rewards incentives that pull rewards away from authors to the tune of 25% without addressing the biggest problem Steem has.
EASE OF USE.
You want to make Steem better, make it easier for newbies. Every one I've signed up has given up within two days of using the platform because they get confused and frustrated! They don't get enough initial SP to vote enough to explore and they leave!
Meanwhile, you're proposing taking more rewards away from me and fellow authors. I spend HOURS creating thoughtful content. Researching, writing, photo editing, video creation, et al and you want to make it even harder for me to earn my small rewards?!
This "big picture" mentality truly misses the point. Without authors, you have NOTHING. Absolutely nothing and if you make it less desirable to create, authors will leave. Coupled with a lack of focus on end user experience and you've got a poison pill and then it's bye-bye, Steem.
Not disagreeing with you that this is super important. I've done a lot myself to try and improve this, but fully acknowledging there is a long ways to go.
It is not really my goal. I actually want authors such as yourself who are contributing value to the platform to be rewarded more. The biggest problem that you face (from my point of view) is there are very few users with enough stake for their votes to count spending time to find your content and vote on it. There is little economic incentive for them to do so. Instead, they mostly delegate their stake to bid bots, and authors who are working hard to make this place better are for the most part getting ignored.
The goal of these changes is not to take money away from authors, but to try and update the incentives structure so that more stakeholders actually upvote your content.
It is hard to see how this will work when the changes are looked at in isolation, and it is also possible that things may not work out as intend. I fully acknowledge that the end result of all this may end up being worse off than things are today - but I assure you my intent behind this is not for that to happen.
... and in future they will join automated curation trails which are upovting stuff from popular users who are earning anyway.
Who isn't curating manually now, won't do that if he gets 50 % curation rewards.
A real curator loves what he is reading and will curate anyway, he doesn't care if curation rewards are 50 or 25 %.
When I upvote stuff I upvote it because I like it. I don't care when I upvote (if for example after exactly 15 minutes), and how many other users have already uptoved that post.
I intentionally seek posts from new and/or unknown authors to give them a dollar or two.
With 50 % curation rewards I can't give them the same amount in future, because then I myself will get a big part of my own upvote back (as curation) instead of being able to support the authors! Sounds ironic anyhow: then I want but cannot anymore support people ...
Why do 'stake holders' care so much about their ROI? What does it help to get a bigger part of a cake which is getting smaller and smaller? I prefer to have a smaller part of a huge cake. :)
If I knew it would let the STEEM price increase significantly, I would accept not to earn one single STEEM from now on. :)
Any why would it increase the STEEM price to seek and upvote posts from new and unknown authors manually? Because a rich pool of satisfied users would also make STEEM much more interesting for larger investors in the long run than it still is today, interesting to place advertisements read by many, to market products, to disseminate information. The value of a (social) network is measured among others by the number of its users.
More thoughts are to be found here.
That is where we are trying to go with the package of changes.
Unfortunately, one of the big disconnects with the economics of the platform is that more users does not directly translate to more demand for STEEM. Even with things such as advertisements, it is the companies who are running them (such as Steemit, Inc.) who are getting all the revenue. Stakeholders don’t see a dime of profit/revenue from advertisements.
Hm ... but imagine that @aggroed (as an example for a company owner) is posting about Steem Monsters, and not 50 people are reading it (where 5 start playing Steem Monsters) but 5000 (where 500 start playing Steem Monsters and buying cards) ...
Or imagine a news paper is considering to open a STEEM account to find new ways to monetize its content ... There have to be enough readers of the articles then ...!
So normally for every business owner and investor the amount of users on a potentially used platform should play a role.
What do you think about the automated way of upvoting ... do you believe a significant number of stake holders would really start to seek, read and upvote posts manually?
As I stated elsewhere, I am not completely against EIP - I hope the best together with you - but maybe I am just skeptical by nature (and by the experience I made here) ... :)
I am skeptical too. I’m not going to sit here and try to promise that this will fix all our problems. The best I can do is explain what the changes are and what our desired (and hopefully expected) results will be.
You are doing that very well. And in addition you listen and answer to the people who are commenting your article.
Last thing (for now): what do you think about retaliation flags?
For example the comment directly on top under your article - I guess normally you would flag it: a self-upvoted, insulting comment, but you know very well what would happen then ... and if in future downvotes will be really cheap (or better to say: give you some rewards), what do you think some whales are going to do then? :)
I think there should be an elected committee with lots of delegated SP (for example from Steemit, Inc.) to be able to discuss, decide about and counter abusive whale flags if necessary. Only then a downvote pool made sense in my opinion.
I don't intend to criticize anybody, but just would like to give some input and hope some of these ideas may become object of witness discussions in future.
They will always be a problem to some extent, and they might get worse under the new proposal.
This is a good idea, and something I would support. The SPS could potentially fund such an organization if stakeholders viewed it as important enough to fund.
Tim,
I fully believe your intentions and goals are good, but the literal outcome, both big and small picture, will be to reduce the rewards that are allocated towards creators, and put Curators on the same compensatory playing field with Creators, full stop. This is an unacceptable reorientation of the rewards system.
Ask yourself: why is it that people go on doing this curation function for free on Facebook and Twitter - and every other free social network before them - and yet for some reason we have to financially incentivize the same behavior on Steem? It's not because of rewards allocations are misaligned, but because the system is idiot proof and shareable in the former and not on Steem. That's it! If the top 20 witnesses pooled their efforts to fix that singular problem, things would dramatically change on this platform. Instead, you're wringing your hands about figuring out how to pay people for the same damn thing people do on other platforms because the refuse to do it here. Does that make any sense to you at all? Because it doesn't make sense for 100% of everyone I've ever gotten to get an account who have quit. They all give the same reason. They love the idea, but hate the execution of Steem. It's confusing and they aren't allowed to vote and share enough upon their initial exploration of the platform. They don't have time to learn it and get frustrated by the most basic of functions.
For the love of all that is good on the platform, stop thinking in economic terms for a moment and consider what regular folks want out of a platform. They want it to be easy. They want it to be fun. They want to be able to choose their own experience. They don't have time to learn what hardcore enthusiasts like ourselves take the time to learn and what the ins and outs of their economic rewards are going to be. You need to invert your priorities.
As an anecdotal point of evidence, consider what I do for a living. I make movies and TV. I regularly screen my work and we regularly take feedback from fans of the TV show I'm on to better their experience. Sometimes you have to know when to say that the audience is wrong, but they often aren't. When someone tells me that the end of my film made them feel confused, I know that something is WRONG and I do my best to fix it within reason. When the audience of my TV show say, "we hate this" we do our best to address what they want within reason.
The same goes for social media. People regularly tell me what they HATE about Steem and what they love. I've raised this issue before with others, but what you're proposing here is literally missing the target as derived from real feedback from real people who can't execute because of the way the user experience is designed. Your solution to this "lack of curation problem", is to diminish creator rewards? Now you're fucking with MY user experience... and my money... and the principle of the matter. I can't tell you how infuriating this proposal is.
Focus on user experience, and user experience alone, and stop fucking with the rewards system. Make the experience effortless for newbies and the curation will come, just like on the platforms where people spend hours a day for free.
I’m not really going to try and argue with you, because I think we have a fundamentally different view on the situation..
This is one of the main reasons why Steem is such a different animal. With the distribution of stake that we have, it doesn’t really matter much what most users are doing. What matters (in terms of rewards) is what the large stakeholders do. They are looking at this more from an investment perspective, and what we have found in practice is that the “average” investor does not care about discovering content, and instead are more concerned over ROI.
I’m not disagreeing that ease of use is not (also) a major issue. From my perspective though, the ability to earn rewards for their contributions is even bigger of an issue for a large portion of users. It is a problem that I believe is necessary to solve in order for our community to substantially grow.
You’re not going to argue with me because you’re incapable of providing evidence to support any of the claims you - and others like you - make for this rewards change. You supposedly have talks with other witnesses and stakeholders. I don’t see any logs of these chats or videos of the chats or who was party to them. Whether there was a consensus or not. I don’t see any outreach on Reddit or Twitter from you. I don’t see any scientific polling or studies. You claim self-voting is a problem when only 6.4% of total votes are self-voted, a tiny problem by my estimation. You claim the price of Steem is somehow related to these rewards distribution without evidence. You claim that what really matters are large stakeholders. You just claim these things.
I have invested what capital I can in Steem and the rest I earn by posting and you are trying to make it harder for people like me to earn my way.
You just can’t see it because your paycheck depends on not seeing it.
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I am not presenting evidence because I don’t have any. I’m not trying to argue with you and say you are wrong and I am right. I am basing my decision on my own observations and understanding of how the stakeholders are behaving under the current incentives structure. My hope is that the new incentives structure will change stakeholder behavior.
Where have I ever said this?
I don’t think I said this either.. The price of STEEM is 100% based on the supply and demand for STEEM. All I can do is speculate on what forces drive demand.
Again, where did I say this?
I have told you already - I am not. My goal is actually to try and increase the amount of money that authors (who are contributing and adding value) make.
I don’t know what you are implying, but I am free to vote on this hardfork however I would like. I am 1000 times more concerned about my paycheck going down due to the price of STEEM going down than I am of loosing witness votes for voting a certain way on this hardfork. You are correct that I am voting a certain way because my paycheck depends on it - just not in the way you think. I want the price of STEEM to go up (not down) which is why I am planning to vote yes.