Negative Voting and Steem
![](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/http://activerain.com/image_store/uploads/2/5/8/8/2/ar130882862428852.jpg)
My past three posts have been focused entirely on political philosophy. Unfortunately, many readers seem to think I was talking about Steem and started jumping to all kinds of unfounded conclusions. Today I would like to actually express my opinion as it relates to Steem.
Ying and Yang
All games require balance. An unbalanced game will eventually collapse once a certain strategy takes over and ensures a certain behavior unchecked profits. Steem was designed with down votes on posts (flags) as a means of keeping a certain kind of bad behavior in check.
Objectively Bad Behaviors
As someone who holds to a subjective view of reality, I like to refrain from making absolute value judgements. I also want to avoid pushing my value judgements on other people. So when I talk about objectively bad behavior I will do so without respect to the nature of content or individual voter’s opinions.
The goal of Steem is to reward users proportional to the value they bring. An objectively bad behavior is one where a user manages to get large rewards while providing others with little value. Unfortunately, value is subjective.
While it is hard to differentiate the relative value of two different things, I think something objective can be said for something that provides no value. If we assume that all information has some positive value, then the lack of information has no value. People casting votes communicates information. Every post with unique content contributes information. The value of the information provided is subjective.
A voting robot that votes “randomly” provides no new information. A poster that publishes “random” content also provides no new information. It is all noise. Some people might even say that by increasing the noise floor this kind of behavior consumes resources and destroys information and therefore could have objectively negative value.
What we can conclude from this is that “objectively bad” behavior is any behavior that can be automated using unsophisticated software and which yields the individual oversized profits.
Authors Paying themselves for Doing Nothing
This type of behavior has one user sucking value from the whole while providing no new value. Generally speaking, this kind of behavior is discouraged by the n2 rewards curve. The rate of return for self-voting on garbage post is so low for most users that it isn’t worth the effort. This reward curve forces collaboration and collusion to actually get meaningful value out of the platform.
A whale is a collusive group. This means that a whale has enough stake to earn a huge profit by voting on their own post regardless of post quality. The only thing that keeps whales from frivolously voting on themselves is the potential to be down voted by other whales. This creates a check and balance at the highest levels which protect the system from abuse.
Curation Rewards for Doing Nothing
This type of behavior is when a whale creates a bot that simply up votes everything from reputable users regardless of quality. This kind of behavior can be countered by other whales only by pushing the author rewards toward 0.
Suppose a post is sitting at a $100 pending payout and a whale up votes it to $1000 with a single vote. Other whales see that as abusive and place a counter acting down vote restoring it to $100 pending payout. The abusive whale will get the vast majority of the $25 curation rewards on that post.
When it comes to curation rewards the system is currently unbalanced. There is no way to negate the profits of abusive curators.
All Abuse is Exercised by Voting
Authors cannot abuse the platform (except by spam). It is only the voters that have the power to be “good voters” or “bad voters”. Rather than placing biased terms of “good” and “bad” I will simply assume “red” and “blue” voters. Neither red nor blue are deemed to be good or bad, they simply have a difference of opinion on where funds should be allocated.
The Steem community is continuously deciding where to allocate money. Every voter “owns” a part of the Steem network with a long term vested interest in increasing its value.
Upvote Only Economy
For the sake of simplicity lets assume budget items are voted on one at a time. The amount something gets paid is based on how many voters vote. Lets also assume there are only two options for voters, “YES” or “ABSTAIN”. Under this model a whale is granted unchecked, unilateral control over a large fraction of the budget.
The financial incentives for a whale in such a position is to embezzle as much money for personal profit as he can without killing the goose laying the golden STEEM. So long as the rate at which is stake grows is faster than the rate at which the STEEM pie shrinks, his own personal net worth will grow.
A malicious whale (hacked account, hostile takeover, etc), would short STEEM on the market and then vote to give himself as much as he could. The STEEM he gives himself can be used to cover his short position and he makes a huge profit off of the demise of the platform.
Up and Down Vote Economy
Under an economy with both up and down votes things are different. Each time a budget item is brought up for vote the voters have three options: “YES”, “NO”, or “ABSTAIN”. Under this model anyone who votes money to themselves without providing value to everyone else will be countered with an equal or greater number of “NO” votes. The system is balanced. Misallocation of funds can only occur if voters collectively allow it to happen.
Curation Rewards are an Up-vote Only Economy
Someone who up votes anything of value beyond what it is worth earns guaranteed curation profits unless others down vote the post below what it was worth. This take value away from other curators and authors and gives robotic whale curators a unchecked easy path to profit.
The abusive whale up voter is not only gaining profits, but denying others the opportunity to earn profits by forcing them to use down votes.
In other words, there is currently no way to “down vote” an “up vote” and therefore, the system is unbalanced and subject to abuse.
Removing Down Votes from Posts
Authors get offended when their post gets down voted. This is an irrational, but understandable human reaction. In reality what is going on is a disagreement among voters. Some voters think the post should be worth more, others think it should be worth less. What if we removed the option to down vote a post?
What if instead of down voting a post, you could down vote a voter? When you down vote a voter you nullify their voting power with your own voting power. It is the moral equivalent of casting equal and opposite votes on every post without offending the posters.
Under such a system authors who vote for them selves and curators who vote robotically would be negated. Only those who vote responsibly would remain. Voting spam would be eliminated.
We have the potential to completely change the game by changing the question we ask. Instead of asking whether the author did a bad job, we can ask ourselves whether the voters did a bad job.
Voters that vote poorly will kill the platform. Voters who vote well will help the platform grow.
Summary
There are many issues left to explore. People will not like having their vote canceled any more than they like having their post down voted. Curation rewards still favor those who use their power to vote over those who use their power to cancel other votes.
Bottom line, a system of only up votes will not work. The game needs to be properly balanced or someone will be able to exploit the rules for undeserved profits.
More to come in a future post.
It is way too early to judge whether the voting system on Steemit is working - we really need 6 months of data. If in 6 months time there are a fair number of whales and an even larger number of dolphins to balance things out, there is no problem at all.
Think of the dolphins as the "middle classes" of the system. All nations with a big middle class are stable. The unstable nations are those with a very powerful 1% and a vast majority minnow class, and very few dolphins that can counteract the 1%.
Therefore the success of Steemit lies in creating as many dolphins in the next 6 months as possible.
I don't see this as possible with the current/projected growth of the platform. The number of new users grows much faster than the current wealth distribution rate, which will arguably only make the problem worse. The big issue right now is unfair visibility. Meanwhile the current "trending page" will always have a limited amount of spots. We need a more dynamical solution that scales with user growth.
If the whales actively took the time to distribute their votes far and wide, then it should be easy to create a large dolphin class that acts like a stabaliser in the system. The problem is some whales are putting short-term gain ahead of long term benefits and only upvoting a select few. Perhaps they think the platform won't last and they need to make as much short-term money as they can. Or perhaps they haven't thought long term at all (a lot of players are NOT strategic when it comes to the long term, but only respond to short-term stimulus).
Still, it could just not be enough. 20 users have 50% of the voting power. Even if they curated full time they might not be able to create enough dolphins.
You have the point, we need to construct that middle class, for example, i will invest in steem powers because n a few days of research i believe that this cryptocurrency an this platform have amazing potential :)
Amazing potential either way, but as far as exploit-ability, whales will always carry the weight and be able to reward themselves and their friends unfairly. Where do we move FORWARD from here with a solution?
The only problem is that 6 months is a very long time when it comes to startups like Steemit. I agree wholeheartedly that 6 months of data would be ideal to have enough data points to draw a more accurate conclusion.
The paradox in doing so is if some of these things get put off for 6 months the platform could very easily begin to compound the already existing issues we're trying to address. Look at how many complaints have been flying around since the beta reopened and that hasn't even generated a full month's worth of data to look at yet.
Please allow me to speak freely.
When I registered, I knew the whole system is practically still in Alpha and that the devs are still constantly tweaking under the hood, which to my great surprise includes updates to the database itself; so the whole system is still quite fluid, understandably.
But some of the reactionary changes that you hint at, or have already implemented (the rep system, for example) at the behest of a choir of complaining users, objectively give the impression that The System cannot be relied on. Users constantly have to live under the fear that they wake up the next day to find a major change implemented without any forewarning or notable discussion, and so far, at least in the last month, these changes have summarily been to the detriment of the ideas of free and open markets and have instead been restrictive and belittling in nature.
So reading your most recent musings about votes on votes leaves the impression that you don't really trust the users and don't trust your own system and its ability to self-regulate as a liberal economy ought to and find an equilibrium once the big "excitement" has been damped. That the devs are willing to tweak and "repair" the blockchain to death until it is plain simply too complex to allow for freedom and anarchy and has become a bureaucratic, metastable domino monster structure of "Code Law" nobody really understands anymore or can rely on.
It sends a message of cowardice, of fear of loss of control. Have some cojones, some trust in your own ideology and allow the system to find itself out, to self-regulate organically and naturally, to slip out of your control, instead of intervening with more code each time a clique great enough make noisy demands for ways to introduce the oh-so-soul-soothing censorship and moderation through the backdoor.
You manage perfectly to ignore the crowd who suggest that the interface is a major pain in the lower back because it still doesn't allow "circles", "tag subscriptions", "favorites", costumizable streem feeds, powerful filters and other simple tools to make curation more enjoyable than wading through tons of the
created
irrelevance - simple, and seemingly easily built tools one must find off-site in the work of independent devs such as roelandp, jesta, mauricemikkers, blueorgy or xeroc.So it is becoming sort of "suspicious" that micromanaging the backbone, the blockchain, in favor of regressive, authoritarian and reactionary demands, even spending time thinking and pontificating about it, takes precedence over a more fluid, liberating and empowering user experience which could easily circumvent the problems all the interventionism is trying (and failing) to solve and raise the value of Steemit for simple, average users who are not so foolish to expect to get rich "steeming".
And it is a pity I must add that this is not a rant against you or Steemit or meant to be a personal attack in any way - that I am merely fulfilling my promise not to be blinded to the dangers of Steemit, to remain intellectually honest and scientifically sceptical. I express my enthusiasm for the cause and my hope for the success of the experiment by alerting you to a very dangerous pitfall: overregulation.
It lowers my own perceived value of Steem much more than its dumb market cap, and I cannot imagine I am the only one having a bad feeling about the way the platform seems to be going with this; and I almost feel bad for hoping "Akasha", "Yours", "ethereal" or whatever comes next prove to be more honest, straightforward, reliable, open, participatory and anarchic systems.
It is important to note. This is not truly anarchistic.
It is based upon shares, stakes, in a company.
Those with more stakes can have more power to vote up or down. They can essentially lift you into the limelight, or drop you into the dregs. This also depends a lot on how whichever tool/site (I like to call them "windows") for viewing the blockchain you are viewing. It could be possible to make a "window" that ordered posts in a completely different way.
It is important to note this is not really anarchistic. It is more like we are all investing in a decentralized corporation as stake/share holders, and one of the desired/stated goals of the corporation is anti-censorship. In terms of the blockchain this is true, yet different "windows" into the blockchain could indeed censor information from their view. This is not necessarily a bad thing. People who want absolutely no NSFW feeds could use a "window" designed for them, and those who love NSFW could have a window where it is brazen and unfiltered and perhaps even intentionally highlighted.
So censorship of the blockchain does not exist. It does however exist on a "window" by window basis, and the up vote/down vote with power based upon shares/stakes can in fact act as a form of censorship.
Yet when we think about it there are some forms of censorship most people do endorse. Censoring the plagiarist, spam, and abusive. Some of those terms being completely subjective.
I agree with you 100%, I have repeatedly predicted Steem's success will stand and fall with the interfaces and analytics tools and filters that will be developed and used a gif from the Zion approach scene in "Matrix Revolution" each time:
I'd be much less concerned if the rep system were simply a metric computed by the interface, a short analysis calculated by summing up- and downvotes somehow. But lo and behold, https://steemd.com/@dwinblood says there is a new cell in the database:
Reputation: 6,233,550,417,451
And it did not even seem to require a hardfork, unlike the update to get rid of the liquidity reward bug using.
Other interfaces will not have such luxuries.
How is this proposal "overregulation"? It's addressing a real problem: people (me included) seem to want a clean way to decrease a post's payout and right now, due to having on other way, they abuse the flag tool to achieve the goal. So it's an important functionality improvement which cannot be fixed on the interface level. For me, it has nothing to do with overregulation.
What you call the interface is a privately owned website. If you want these tools and Steemit.com fails to deliver them, just go and build them on your own website similar to Steemit.
The "Flag" symbol itself is already a symbol of overregulation, a psychological weapon to discourage natural and organic intervention when the payouts are too high. Calling the downvote a "flag" and abuse it as an instrument for castigation is already a sign of fear.
While true, I am referring to it in its function as interface, not in is function as privately or otherwise owned website.
With black jack and hookers, @innuendo, with black jack and hookers.
Yes ... A good name is better than riches...
the rep system
Right on. Well said. Adding "features" such as a reputation system is actually adding censorship. I agree that they should be concentrating on creating front-ends to make curation more fun, and profitable to committed users, and encouraging the creation of tools and bots that really help, with really smart AI. Instead of trying to kill bots by ruining the experience for everyone to freely vote and post whatever content they choose and as much as they like, we need to embrace them and make them really useful.
This is 2016. People need to accept that AI is a tool, an extension of ourselves. Restricting the use just because someone, like Wang, is /successful/ is a form of censorship and a limitation of freedom of expression, and to me, a limitation of the freedom of thought, because to me, a bot is an extension of my own mind. It votes with the strategy I program it to vote with. It is me. And no one, under the original Steemit implementation, had the right to limit how and when I vote.
I think it even simpler, tbh. With the proper front-end, you could simply save a blacklist. There would be a market for blacklist, @cheetah would get upvotes to no end for providing curated lists of known spammers, malbots, plagiators, impersonators and trolls, and, depending on severity and heuristics, hide or block their posts automatically so they never take up one second of attention. Problem solved.
Who needs a reputation system if you have such an incentive to behave well?
Has your ability to vote been limited in any way?
Yes, because voting power decreases with votes cast, then I am always consciously thinking of whether or not I should vote on something based on my past history of voting. Think about that for a second. I am altering my behavior of trying to reward content and comments I like and think have value (such as your comments), because I thought something else I just read had value too? That's not right. I'm censoring my actions based on my previous actions, and making a decision to vote or not based not on the value offered by the post/comment, but simply based on my prior actions. That sucks.
I don't remember any time when voting wasn't restricted by consumable power. That would lead to horrible vote spamming abuse. In the early releases, vote power recharged by the day (instead of five days currently) and each vote used more of it compared to now.
Another limitation is the algorithm for weighing your vote based on age. What about short posts that take 1 second to read and you like it? You vote it up and it goes to the moon and you get a pittance. You have to apply a strategy to time your vote? That is just wrong.
By this criterion, witnesses are objectively bad. They make ~1.5k Steem per day doing nothing but running a piece of software. Everything extra they may do as witnesses ends up receiving a lot of extra money in the form of upvotes when they post about it. It's therefore untrue that 1.5k include additional work done for the community, and a good half of witnesses don't do anything extra and don't even bother giving status updates to @clains. Upvoting is the one and only true mechanism to incentivize community work, and it works great. The large witness payout is entirely unjustified and could be reduced manyfold without losing any witness or risking a degradation of server quality. A good dedicated server costs $100 per month. 1500 Steems per day amount to $67500 per month at today's rate. This is the kind of money a quant trader makes per month on Wallstreet, and they work 10h+ per day from morning-preopen at 7~8am writing bots and making advanced statistical models, and risking their career when there is a fuck-up. This is also 6x the monthly salary of an average experienced developer in the US. Yes, you read well: a single witness is paid as much as 6 experienced US developers or 10 junior developers or 20~40 developers in developping markets, and he isn't even working for that: just running a software provided by Steemit, checking hardfork announcements, and upgrading when there is a hardfork.
Witnesses are the most parasitic and objectively bad (following this post's usefulness based definition) actors in the whole system. This is the most ludicrously overpaid and low requirement position I have ever seen in any organization in my entire life. Yet nothing is done about it. The only proposal to allow witnesses to volunteer to reduce their pay was pushed back in a "meeting" (that probably involved some obviously self-interested witnesses as well).
Given the ridiculous and totally unjustified payout, it is ludicrous to support downvoting posts that make too much money. The best paid blogger doesn't even get as much as any witness, in spite of the fact that blogging is actual work where as being a witness is an almost entirely passive job that consists essentially in running a piece of software and upgrading steemd when there is a hardfork (everyone else also upgrades steemd anyway).
Both the witness payout and up/down voting need to be fixed. I've written a fix proposal for the up/down voting here:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@rampant/how-to-fix-downvoting-a-set-of-proposals-for-a-solution
I hadn't even considered that really.
I don't find it ridiculous at all. Curation is about finding the right price for a post. Some people might think a post is undervalued (so they upvote) and other might find it overvalued (so they reduce the payout by counteracting the upvotes, as @dan proposes). And this has nothing to do with jealousy or any other emotions, it's just a process of properly allocating our limited funds.
I agree with you that witnesses are probably overpaid. It's certainly not true that they just "do nothing but run a piece of software", but still these payments seem to be excessive at this stage. What I fail to understand is this logic: if we have a problem in area A, then should allow a similar problem to exist in area B. I'd think we should just fix the problem both in area A and B.
What's ludicrous is not the concept of downvoting a post that gets "too much" but the fact that @dan is calling it "objectively bad" to receive more blogging payout than deserved when at the same time he caved in on his one and only feeble attempt at reducing ridiculously overprices witness salaries. The argument in the git ticket is laughable: the ticket was closed because there was a push back from witnesses (of course!) and it was decided that allowing witnesses to voluntarily reduce their salary was going to create competition and push the salaries downward which would reduce "quality" of witnesses (like if there was any need of "quality" to run a binary on a $100/month dedicated server and upgrade it once in a while..). Witness salaries are as bad for the system as the totally broken liquidity reward once was. This needs to be changed, and asking witnesses' opinion is a bad idea because obviously they will not approve something that affects their bottom line. All witnesses made it to their position because @dan, @dantheman, @ned and @steemit voted them in. If they are not happy with a salary cut away from their 60k+ per month wallstreet-like salaries, it would just take a change of vote by @dan and co. for them to be replaced by anyone among the hundreds of quality people waiting in line for a witness position. The only reason nothing is being done is because many of current witnesses are old Bitshares VIPs who have a direct connection to Dan and feel entitled to receive a special treatment, and apparently Dan doesn't have the heart to remove them that. It's so much easier to downvote bloggers who get "too much" rather than reallocate some of that witness orgy to give more to the content producers.
The funds for witnesses are separate from funds for posts & curation. So even if we reduced rewards for witnesses those funds could not be easily allocated elsewhere. We have two problems and both of them need to be fixed. Let's fix curation first (as it affects lots of users) and then turn attention to witnesses.
I agree with a lot what you say about witnesses. But consider this: the purpose was to create a situation where these guys have a lot to lose when they misbehave. If their salaries where closely related to their costs, it would be easy to bribe them.
We are doing hardforks every week. It doesn't take much coding to change the hardcoded proportion of relative witness payout and content creation incentive fund. And even without reallocating explicitely the funds, the simple fact of reducing witness salary will reduce Steem Power inflation and give everyone else proportionally more stake in the system
Looking at how much skin in the game a witness has can be a criterion for voters to consider, but that doesn't mean witnesses need to be showered with cash just to make sure they have skin in the game. The mere fact someone can get enough clout to become a witness implies in a large majority of cases that she is either a whale, an Bitshares VIP, or a popular content creators who will have already accrued quite a bit of skin in the game. Beside many witnesses are powering down from an already huge stash of SP so that pretty much everything they earn as witness is just liquidated right away.
Witnesses are right now literally controlled by Steemit. They will obey slavishly to anything Steemit ask them to do because if they don't and they lose the support of Steemit, there goes their beautiful witness position and its generous pay.
"This type of behavior is when a whale creates a bot that simply up votes everything from reputable users regardless of quality. This kind of behavior can be countered by other whales only by pushing the author rewards toward 0."
Unfortunately we already know that some whales are doing this and their is no counterbalance with other whales downvoting such posts - it only happens very occasionally. Most of these posts are of decent quality but even if they were not I'm not sure most whales would flag them. It does seem to be improving though because we have seen less auto upvotes for plagiarising material but as long as whales use upvoting bots the risk of low quality material rising to the top remains.
"Voters that vote poorly will kill the platform. Voters who vote well will help the platform grow."
I agree with this which is why I think using voting bots in general should be a no-no. If the whales don't have time they could delegate their voting (if it is added to Steemit) and until then there will be greater voting power for everyone else when they don't vote. Nobody should get an automatic whale up-vote.
I think the negative voting aspect could work but as you say people will not like that. It would also be interesting to know how many minnows would be required to negate a single whale up-vote. I suspect it would be so many as to make it pointless.
I feel like there should be no downvote on this platform and that the flag should only be used in situations where people are copying and pasting content from outside sources. The fact of the matter is the Whales aren't hardly voting. If you look on CatchAWhale.com the entire first page of whales have voting power of usually 99% or 100%. I'm constantly engaging and voting and my voting power is usually between 60% and 80%. I'm not saying the curation reward should be increased but I have a feeling the whales are too busy or uninterested in spending the time engaging with the community like those who are new to the platform. This will cause the attrition level of good new content creators to be pretty extreme. I see it on YouTube all the time. People busting ass and then they quit because they can't be profitable. I'm not trying to sound like a Baby Back McBitch but if the whales don't vote and engage with the content creators then we are looking at a very long period of blogging for pocket change. It could cause Steemit to not reach escape velocity to get to Mars like I thought we were on all on board with.
That's why we need incentivized downvotes, otherwise that imbalance in voting pressure will always cause issues. Here's a possible implementation based on a concept similar to prediction markets.
I'm new to Steemit and was surprised to find that voting bots were allowed. If the idea is to promote quality content through community voting, then all voting should be by the people in the community. If automated voting is allowed in order to make money for an individual, that threatens the integrity of the system and the community.
It isn't that they are allowed, it is that they cannot be prevented.
It can't be prevented but the community can make it clear that it is considered bad behaviour. That can bring considerable pressure on people and help to create a change in attitude.
@thecryptofiend Not to mention many of us have been flagging most of the more annoying bots so much they've been cast off deep into the depths of the block chain. Due to their negative Rep, many of the more unpopular bots have never been seen again since the new rep system went into effect.
What kind of "considerable pressure" would make @wang decide to stop making ~$4.5k USD/week from his upvoting bot?
That has happened. There have been many debates about that.
In a prior life I worked in technology. I'm not sure how a bot could not be detected and removed. But more to your point, if the community could downvote voting bots that would help to equalize the voting and make things more fair. The only thing you'd need, aside from the mechanism, is the ability for the community to aware of this type of bot voting and take action.
I think that is a very difficult cop-out to make to just say
"I hope ethical behavior prevails"
this is the internet and placing a dollar value next to a post influences greed.
More on topic of a solution, should users be able to upvote their own posts? Should there be a master thread for unethical behavior? Or if we're embracing botting, should there be a whalebot to show off large unethical profit margins?
This will work great for over-payment flag. So flagging the vote rather than the author is a good idea.
And who will judge the voters of the "bad" voters?
The voters of the bad voters of the bad voters?
If we have a fair system(?). Theoretical the end result of the voters vote should be fair(?) No?
Maybe make it more democratic/fair?.... We should not take into account only SP but the voters reputation also !
It makes more sense when for example 2 whales have the same SP (Steem Power) that the voting weight of the more reputable whale have more impact compared with the less reputable whale! Think about it!
Give at least 30% weight to REPUTATION! (debatable)
70% impact because of SP
30% impact because of REPUTATION
What do you think?
I think it's too natural for a user with a 65 reputation to be for such a proposal
Do you want an account of a reputation of (-4) to have the same or more impact than an account with a reputation of (42) for example? ;)
Well that would make both solutions quite similar wouldn't it?
One would reward those who vote fairly, the other one would reward those who make content/comments that are well received on the site. Since good commenters aren't necessarily good voters, the former system seems more suitable.
Interesting concept, we will see what happens.
It still ends up as a popularity contest. Who will be the masters, who the slaves?
My biggest pet peeve is that people upvote without reading.
That's something that is akin to setting the whole steemit idea on fire. Don't upvote just because "dantheman" upvoted, READ THE FRICKING POST!
Don't upvote because YOU THINK it's gonna be popular, READ THE FRICKING POST and make your own opinion.
That's how you make steemit work...
/rand over\
;)
:)))))
maybe it would be a good idea to only make the upvote available inside the post, not on a list view of posts
And maybe even a time delay to ensure you don't just open and vote. Just like 15 seconds or so. This would only be annoying to those who don't read the content.
It really doesn't matter, most early votes are done by bots.
The main issue with this request, sadly, is that most people are just lazy. They want to dump out the box of cereal and get the prize as opposed to arriving to it after going through the process of eating several bowls of it.
...hey! don't kill my faith in people and steemit. we will not be like the rest, we are not lazy :D
You and me both buddy, you and me both.
Hey, I eat the cereal...
I think the upvote button outside the post should be removed as it just encourages people to vote based on a title or it's payout value. Removing it wouldn't stop people from jumping down the page and doing it, but at least it would make it more of a nuisance to people gaming the system that way.
this can be done easily, also hiding the post value at the time could be a cool idea for an hour or so, although people voting because they see a whale upvoted won't be stopped by that :)
I really like this idea. It would make people actually curate for quality.
Organic voters that have enough SP who upvote before they read the post is a small, negligible minority. My bot doesn't read any post, yet it correctly predicted 6 of the 8 top trending posts yesterday (similar most other days).
Let me know when actually reading content becomes as profitable. The problem isn't in the culture, it's in the voting system.
fair point. i disagree on your view though, a greedy approach is cultural but of course, can't be helped. Your bot did well and you see it as an argument that "reading is not profitable" I see it as a sign that lack of diversity and not enough whales upvotes are chocking steemit\s potential growth...the sooner we see more posts and different authors making trending the better.
That being said, I liked your post and upvoted.
Thank you for your comments!
Why do you say you disagree if you say it can't be helped? ;)
Even if it were possible, wouldn't changing the "greedy" approach also go against the very essence of Steemit (getting paid for content creation/curation)?
Well yes! I hope, for the sake of this platform, that this bot issue will get better, otherwise there's just no point in manually curating/reading content. I think the diversity is there, tit's just not on those vote bots' authors list. There's really no reason for the problem to disappear. From an economic perspective, voting for someone who isn't on those lists is almost always a bad decision.
This means that the relative rate at which authors are added to those bot lists is necessarily going to be less than user growth/content creation. So the problem may appear like it's getting better, while actually getting worse. Scary thought!
interesting insight, man. I wouldn't have thought of that but I see the point! Looking forward to reading your stuff, you have quirky and original way of thinking.
I 'agreed' with you 2 (closing on 3) months ago, so I cannot see why not do it again.
Solution to the Curation Rewards
I agree, but we are not living in a perfect world.
A Steemit AI code should fix this in the future.
what does this even mean? that people act out of greed against their self-interest but thinking they are actually acting in their interest? yeah. not perfect.
Holy cow, that statement is like a conundrum wrapped in a state of confusion. I'm still wrapping my head around it! :D
i triple checked: legit sentence!
Well! It is correct that you do not say so! But there is one - but? Under the terms of payment the first voted has bigger percent from profit. It's put in a system. If as you speak at first to read and then to vote. My voice will be 135 for example when I will read it, I will make the comment and what turns out on my statistics? At the end of payment, my vote receives that? In what there can be a reason?
actually voting at 20-30 minutes is "optim" but i'm not talking about that here. I'm talking about voting for the right reasons mostly.
I really don't think that's true. Probably closer to 10 mins on any popular author.
I agree with you. It is not correct to vote without analysis. The article has to it is pleasant. But considering that we now on the new use upvote. Earlier they had no weight.
I get it, you said "rand over" at the end to see if anyone read to the end!! ;0)
I wish, but it was just typo :D
Yes, that was hard to watch. Your post on the origins of the right to vote had the potential to spark an enriching discussion on political thought but was unfortunately commandeered. Perhaps once the voting controversy dies down you can reinitiate the discussion.
downvoting because your self-vote
You got cajones the size of the moon.....downvoting @dantheman is brazen!
And you upvoted yourself to boot.....man that takes some serious nads!
Haha, didn't notice that one. Do as I say, not as I do...
Removed my upvote from this comment because you removed yours from mine.
Oh the irony! LOL! I was wondering if you would see that....it is back now MEGA BALLS....LOL
That's the beauty of voting. The freedom to act with emotions and do something with your power.
Lol
You're supposed to vote for your own posts unless you're abusing the ability by upvoting all your own comments as well.
![](https://steemitimages.com/0x0/http://i.imgur.com/uDNqsKs.gif)
It's only an abuse with comments because with actual posts your rewards are diluted after 4. Please refer to my other comment on this thread!
I disagree. Upvoting your own post still has negative effects on the system as a whole.