RE: Masternode Manipulation - A Work of Art
I hadn't read the papers but just started doing so. Its funny, how everything sounds so well-devised, and then you show up here and its like Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome. Clearly, abuse of the system was thought of, but in the completely opposite context to what the masses appear to want.
Regarding the curators, yes, again, its great that they're doing that, but they are not getting anywhere close to what the bots are doing in terms of exponential growth. And I can see their process as enormously confusing to most people.
From p.15 of the whitepaper "Eliminating “abuse” is not possible and shouldn’t be the goal. Even those who are attempting to “abuse”the system are still doing work. Any compensation they get for their successful attempts at abuse or collusion is at least as valuable for the purpose of distributing the currency as the make-work system employed by traditional Bitcoin mining or the collusive mining done via mining pools."
Say what? Crabs in a bucket - that's cute. So it seems it was devised in a similar manner as Bartertown, after all.
But that's good news for the antibots too. Making bots unprofitable isn't enough. They have to become useless. Futile.
And then you have the "whales" that shape this community into whatever crap heaven they want it to be.
Obviously, it is a system that can be taken over, but with what effort? You would need to be able to accumulate power faster than the bots. You would need to be able to squash the efforts of the whales.
The payout system is based on Zipf's law (which is basically logarithmic - and I have built models with it in the past). This is one of the reasons the bots get so powerful, so fast. When you are at the top of that food chain, more people use you, just like common words in the english language.
This is a perfect analogy! Don't forget that steemit is still in its beta but I completely understand where you are coming from.
You could also do this by being a witness, I mean it is still unlikely but if you could get in the top 20 then you would basically have a say in what happens in steemit (to the point where you can change the blockchain sourcecode) but I mean then looking at the top 20 witnesses its not hard to realize that most of them offer a vote selling service.
If we could get the @steemit account (and @ned and @dan) to help fight the abuse then we wouldn't have issues but then someone might say thats something that could cause a spark and many complaints. As you pointed out, it would be difficult to change the place by onesself but a group on the other hand might have a chance.
Well in a way it appears to be in the DNA. It is right there in black and white. And I would say something like, "well that was before the trending page looked like an early version of 4chan", but it was just revised in August of 2017.
It really boils down to what the creators want it to be vs. what the people want it to be. Again my biggest complaint was that an ecosystem created for content creators battling against juggernauts like google for adsense pennies while spending hours upon hours of work are no better off aside from a few, because of 300 lines of code running on a Vultr server upvoting junk. So maybe not as drastic as Zipf, but something more linear.
You need numbers to rock and ecosystem like this, and noble causes don't get anywhere if it means adjusting the system that's already working for a 1% in power. They can make it whatever they want it to be.
I really don't know what the answer is aside from changing this layer. I can see you have spend a ton of time thinking about this so perhaps you have an idea, but it would have to be dead simple and easy for the masses to latch onto.
I do know that people are fighting here each and every day because of a much more macro problem. And its passionate, because real lives and real time are now invested. So when someone like this guy has the ability to crush anyone's dreams of making it here because he downvotes anyone critical of him (which he has done), that's a dystopia if I ever saw one. Nothing free about it. Digital version of Genghis Khan.
Numbers we do have, though I can't say I am the one who decided to spearhead this whole thing, that comes from some with way more invested into this. I am just here to escape my real life and while the steemit drama is bad, I will take it over some of the other stuff I have seen out there.
You should have seen steemit a year ago or so, when I had first heard about it. I mean things evolve but there wasn't fighting like there is now. I mean back then there was disagreement amongst witnesses but with libraries being updated and people actually cared about growing the steemit community to expand and get new members. The trending page (while still mostly crypto) had posts that were deemed to be good quality by people to the point where you wanted to read it (also back then $100 post was good enough to be trending near the top)
That, I think, is why I fight. I saw firsthand the potential of steemit. I mean it had its own problems (it was far from the utopia that some describe it as) but it was nowhere near what it is now...
Personally I still think that we should shy away from the linear reward algorithm (my vote at 100% is worth 0.20 no matter when I vote, in a square root algorithm makes it so my vote is only worth that if I am the first person voting and each person afterwards has their vote become worth less and less) as using one of the other implemented reward schemes could put an effective cap on rewards (and all we would need is the witnesses to change the scheme in their config files).
As for the implementation of Zipf's law, well that was the hypothetical model for the reward scheme but in practice it didn't work anywhere near that. If it were true then there would be logarithmic progression of payouts between deviations of the medium and instead we have a wealth classification that is closer to modern capitalism where we have segregation of payouts between the 1% and the 99%
As is, steemit will never work. If we could overhaul the entire system, starting from scratch with what we know now and treat this as an experiment then maybe we could fix the problems... But too many people are way to invested in this platform in order to just let it die, and others have been slowly cashing out, just keeping enough in to draw attention away.
This site is well rooted at this point, so it will always have traffic going forward. Narrative is a new competitor I have yet to look into (not even sure when they're launching) but the economics seem similar. I really don't know.
I'm all about the path of least resistance when it comes to anything (this is where my trading experience layers over into life). Time is precious and efforts are usually better spent elsewhere where yield is greater. I would say start by looking at where you have the highest ability to change something in the here and now. I realize this is broad but again, all the creators of this site need to do is stop giving so much visibility to garbage. Get rid of the trending page alltogether. Rearrange content. All top layer stuff. The fighting around here is basically a laughing stock though and why so many people don't take it seriously. Again, it turned into a video game, not a publishing platform. This Heijin guy's analysis is total rookie junk meant to serve him and him alone and yet I see 50 of his articles a day on here. I have zero interest in his stuff yet thats all I find without spending hours digging deep.
Another solution is to keep the website, nodes, and previous data intact and change the blockchain to prevent certain things in the future. Thats the great thing about the blockchain is we can just drop a hardfork on the consensus of data. I mean we will never be able to prevent bots from being made but we could at least prevent post from making large rewards. As for the trending, hot, and promoted tabs, I tend not to look at those for content. My preference is looking at specific peoples blogs that I have met on here but that is easier said than done... Many would say that steemit is not the best way to make a profit and that if your end goal is that then you are better off on other platforms as steemit has many problems and to turn in run but I seriously doubt you need any more of that sentence from me. I would say steemit is a path of resistance, then again if someone has very little crypto knowledge I would say steemit is one of the easier ones to adapt due to not requiring the knowledge on getting and setting up a wallet (and securing it) so it definitely has a role but I feel its system is more of a beta...
You were talking about a newer competitor? Unless they learned from steemits mistakes then the first few weeks will be an easy way to make thousands of tokens, again unless they learned. I will look into it!
Yes here they are: https://www.narrative.network/
And I say play ball on a fork, why the heck not. I setup and ran a forum for a time that just provided rewards based on activity - amazing how things change when real money gets involved. If the mobile gaming industry is able to prevent bot abuse then why not anything else? I think anything is possible.
As we like to have everything decentralized, you can see why central authority exists in many cases. If they accumulate enough power, the wolves can run rampant and destroy the ecosystem.
The problem with bots on steemit is that they provide the API open source for third parties to develop apps for. That isn't to say we cannot make running bots more difficult with purely changing code but it can be very difficult to distinguish from honest human interaction and something being done by an app (as there is busy.org which also uses the steem blockchain along with some other sites). I mean even then you could simply write a python client that interacts with html elements directly and its, I have to say that it is easier making a bot for web applications than it is on mobile phones, though still not impossible.