RE: Improving the Economics of Steem: A Community Proposal
Moving from a linear rewards curve to a convergent linear rewards curve.
Wha tis the threshold, Is there an example of how this would work? It's pretty vague.
This essentially empowers the popular accounts to get more rewards because they get more votes, while those who are less popular will get less rewards than they do now since only hiugh SP superlinear voting can give them significant rewards at a lower vote count.
Coupled with changes to curation which is to motivate people to curate through financial incentives, the way curation is done is already highly geared towards financial incentives, i.e. people are motivated/incentivized to vote in order to get curation rewards by voting for posts that get higher rewards.
When you reduce the curation rewards that will be obtained by voting for content that is not highly rewarded, this motivates more people to the incentive to vote for the popular highly rewarded accounts (more so than now). If they vote as they do now on less popular content, they will get less curation rewards. They will thus be more inventivized to go vote for more popular content in order to match the the relative curation rewards they used to get. Unless the curation reward increase is enough to offset this, those who vote on less popular posts will see less curation rewards due to the superlinear rewards allocation. But even then, the more popular posts will generate even more curaiton rewards compared to less popular posts.
The more powerful accounts will have more influence over who is rewarded through superlinear voting. Finding or rewarding "quality content" will be determined by the "whale" class once again. Or by the new "whales", the vote selling bots and their vote buyers. You won't need quantity of upvotes when you can just buy a vote. Won't this increase more authors to buy votes since they will be getting less rewards with the curation reward increase and the superlinear reward change?
Curation rewards are nill to most users until they have enough SP. That's the majority of users. Those who beenfit the most from higher curation are the higher SP accounts.
Didn't Ned speak in favor of vote selling in the past? If this is a problem as mentioned above about passive delegation to bidbots, why isn't that being targeted directly?
Vote selling and buying will still be around with all these changes, and those who buy votes buy the packing on of votes (quantity), which this quoted change will simply increase their rewards. Meanwhile, the people who aren't buying votes will have less rewards go to them through reward pool allocation.
If implemented, will any of these changes possibly be reversed? If so, what will determine if they are to be reversed? What will determine if it is a success and should stay?
Create a separate “downvote pool.”
I don't agree. Some don't have any issue flagging people because they don't like the author or their posts. Rewarding this behavior simply incentivizes more malicious behavior, as they will be rewarded for doing it.
All these changes will likely be implemented anyways, despite objections about the negatives they can (or will) bring. I hope changing things back can be done quicker if the negatives happen. Though changing things back hasn't been something done quickly on Steem before, so I doubt that will be the case. Has anything ever been changed back before?...
100% agree. Such fundamental changes should be automatically rolled back after a predefined time period, UNLESS the community votes to keep it.
I also think trafs logic is not correct. In my opinion, it only benefits the whales, everyone else loses influence, income, and incentives to post because the curators get a bigger share. 50/50 is nuts...
My very rough guess is that right now, around 70% of active steem power is redirecting rewards back into their own pockets through either self voting, voting selling to bid bots, spamming micro votes or some other means
This is because the current economic system pays stakers 4x as much to undermine by platform via the above means than to take part in honest curation. We've long passed the point where big stakers can keep each other in check with downvotes because we understand we understand that if any individual staker chose to use their voting power to downvote someone else, not only would it deprive themselves of the opportunity of claiming that reward for themselves, most of the rewards rescued will just be redistributed to others engaging in the exact same actions.
75% of author rewards might sound like a lot, but in reality stakers are claiming both the author and curation rewards of their own votes leaving pitifully little for actual content creators, irrespective of how good their content is. The paper value of the split doesn't matter if none of it goes in the right direction: that is gradually from the stakeholders to the talented content creators via inflation like it is intended. This isn't happening at the moment because our economic system isn't sufficiently incentivizing the stakers to vote honestly, thus the plead for EIP.
I actually want the maximum amount of rewards going from stakers to authors in an honest way at a steady rate. Because the part that goes back into the stakers pockets is redundant; making a inflationary coin just for everyone to reclaim is silly unless it serves a purpose: if it sufficient motivates stakers enough to actually find and reward good content.
Raising curation from 25% to 50% will mean authors will suffer a 33% on paper decrease in rewards. But 50% of an system where votes are mostly honest is vastly more than 75% of next to noting because the money just gets shoved back into stakers own pocket. So in practice, the idea is to get much more money into the hands of authors.
Economic system is not about the naive direct effects of a change, it's about the result at equilibrium. We can make author rewards 100% but if all the large voters just get that money back for themselves, authors see none of it and the system fails. The entire idea behind EIP is to make it more profitable for voting honestly (higher curation) and less profitable to do otherwise (threats of some free downvotes)
Of course if curation was 90%, most of us stakers would vote pretty honestly, but they'll be too little rewards motivating good authors to create content. So you see, it's an optimization problem of finding the right amount to mostly maximize author rewards in practice.
I understand that it is an optimization problem, but I don't understand why you are so fixated on 50/50.
Usually, when you are trying to optimize something you slowly turn it up until you reach a point where you see the change going into the wrong direction again. Then you start testing the range of the breaking point.
Lets say you find the breaking point is 45% curation. Then you try to find the best split in the 38-44% range.
I understand that testing would take months or years, but nobody seems to even consider testing this. Stinc could run a live copy of the steem chain an see how it would affect the distribution if you change the numbers.
But just picking a random number like 50/50 and hoping that it's the best split possible for reaching your proclaimed goals is delusional in my opinion. It might be better than it is now, but is likely not the best split possible.
@vandeberg's deep dive on the topic should help explain this better: https://steemit.com/steem/@vandeberg/reward-curve-deep-dive
The idea is to gain the benefit of having a curve without moving far away from linear that we currently have. It's being described as convergent linear because you quickly converge into mostly linear, it could also be described as minimally superlinear. This is drastically different than the n^3 or n^2 that we had prior to linear.
No solution will ever be exactly perfect, but we may be able to attain something much better than we have and promote the type of behavior that most user's would like to see (by making it more economically advantageous to do so).
No solution that only tweaks how corrupting curation can be profitably undertaken will. In that you are correct. However, code is infinitely mutable, and I have proposed mechanisms in reply to the OP here that do eliminate such corruption of curation as financial incentive, and replace that incentive with one to fund development via the SPS and @steemalliance.
Please take the time to set me straight on that proposal.
Thanks!
ty, I've heard a hundred of these discussions, but there is never anything approaching consensus... kind of grinds on the community
SPS will be a big improvement since we can have stakeholders directly vote on proposals and see where people stand relative to consensus in an objective way.
The only important consensus is between steemit. inc and witnesses.
Luckily.
Larger accounts having a bigger say in the way rewards are distributed is an unavoidable consequence of stake based consensus. As much of a disadvantage as this may seem, it's one of the few sybil resistant ways that things can work in a decentralized fashion.
The idea is to get stake based voting to approximate general consensus over content appeal. This can only happen if stakers are motivated to vote in a way that consistent with their honest estimation of the general appeal of content.
Currently stakers are not motivated to do this because curation rewards are too low so they just end up selling votes or voting themselves causing the broad system failure. We have to change the economics including curation to entice them.
The phenomenon of having established popular authors gaining higher rewards is something every social media platform sees. To some degree, it's not a bad thing as people building a good reputation based on skill and talent will see increasing rewards over time. Higher curation itself doesn't solidify established authors, as there's a zero sum game between curators to vote early (but not too early) to take more curation rewards from later voters, but not to over vote due to the threat of downvotes.
Downvotes suck yes, but they're necessary to turn this place around. I'm not advocating for a separate pool the same size as the upvote pool, but just a fraction of that size so that we all have a stick to keep the other stakers honest that doesn't cost us money to swat them with.
This is false. It is entirely dependent on incentives as to how that distribution is effected. Currently, and under your proposal, financial incentive will promote extraction of rewards for ROI.
Substituting gaming curation rewards over selling votes does not fix corrupting curation at all. It just changes how that corruption can be gamed. The change of economics necessary to fix the problem is to eliminate incentive to game curation altogether. Nothing else will prevent @therealwolf from maximizing his financial returns from corrupting curation.
A critical part of that equation is financially encouraging development of Steem via SPS dividends to promote capital gains by improving the investment vehicle, and together both mechanisms I propose do that.
Downvotes are broken presently, and adding financial incentive to Bernie's efforts to censor will not fix the problems. Look at my last 100 comments for necessary background requisite to consider how to fix downvotes. I'm fine with how they are now, if the only alternative is making it actually profitable for Bernie to flag.
Indeed. IIRC he called it an interesting business model or something to to that effect.
That, my friend, was a catastrophic fail of both leadership and ethics imo. He could have readily nipped that problem in the bud long ago.
Tbh it is one of the single greatest reservations in investing in the platform. @ned giving vote selling a nod and now their kind are basically running the ship.
I don't know what kind of cognitive dissonance some of these stakeholder must be experiencing. They have been selling votes for their financial interest instead of fostering an economy that encourages meaningful contribution. Now they suddenly think 50/50 is going to change the dynamic?
No. The incentives will still favor vote predictors / curation snipers over people actually evaluating content.
And free downvotes? Don't get me started. The most vocal advocate for this is one that self votes his alts all the time. Now they want free downvotes? Why? So they can downvote competitors bid bot posts and not lose the opportunity those precious proxy self vote opportunities? Or maybe they just want to downvote actually trash to virtue signal while proxy their trash.
Bunch of damn hypocrites if you ask me.
Totally agree. SMT'S and Communitys should be Top Priority. Because this is a thing that could really bring value to Steem. New ideas and Projects that could rise from this.
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Self voting has been removed then reinstalled a number of times if memory serves.
Well said! I agree with you on every point of consequence.
Thanks!