RE: Life Ain't "Fair" and Neither Is Steem. Deal with It and Self-Vote Away.
I agree with the general thrust of your argument. You make good points.
The people arguing on the other side of this seem like either well-meaning people who are ignorant of how Steem works (this is usually obvious because they think they can "punish" away this behavior and that it won't immediately come back in sock puppets) or idealogues.
I got into it last night with the creator of the "Smackdown.kitty" bot that is literally designed to troll Steemit and auto-flag self votes, then name-and-shame the targets in a regular report post. I asked him a question on his position and he just kinda flipped out. Seemed pretty innocent.
I have a tiny nitpick:
"That would be insanity and large groups of people don't generally behave in insane, self-harming ways."
exactly I agree anything that is less than linear would result in many sock puppets
Well, I wrote the bot 🙃 It's not for sure we'll go ahead with it, still discussing it with everyone.
The name-and-shame report is almost certainly going ahead though. And why not? I think there's broad agreement that assigning yourself $70 of Steem for a comment constitutes a valid disagreements of rewards, to put it mildly. In lieu of a systematic solution we are doing the best we can to highlight the issue.
And regardless of broad agreement, are we not entitled to use our stake as we wish to influence the platform? I don't mean that facetiously, I think it's one thing we can all agree on.
"I think there's broad agreement that assigning yourself $70 of Steem for a comment constitutes a valid disagreements of rewards, to put it mildly."
Is there, though? I'm not just being a pest here. What if I write a high-quality comment, say 10 paragraphs, with time, research, citations? Suppose that comment would have made $80 if it was a separate post (I realize we can not know this, but hypothetically), but I made this comment as the 6th reply in a nested conversation? Maybe even in the dreaded "show more replies"?
Isn't self-upvoting this quality content, that is highly likely to make no rewards, justified?
What if I feel that comment deserves my self-upvote, but I don't want to be perceived as attempting to win the argument by putting big numbers on my comment payout? Or perhaps I don't want to reorder the comments? Suppose I then upvote another, more innocuous comment of my own instead, to create that value I feel is deserved without attempting to "bias" the audience of my comments?
The preceding hypothetical is an actual thing I've done, by the way, not a game of Devil's Advocate.
"And regardless of broad agreement, are we not entitled to use our stake as we wish to influence the platform? I don't mean that facetiously, I think it's one thing we can all agree on."
Well, I agree here certainly, and though this is not technically a contradiction, I feel like it's a little unfair to use this argument when you are the "aggressor" and the self-voters are on the "defensive". Not meaning to use loaded language here, but I'm not sure of a better description...
Self-voters aren't creating the Dawg.Bot to follow you guys around and flag all your posts about the Smackdown Kitty. They are just kinda doing their own thing, which as much as I hate to admit it (because I like standing against what I perceive to be unjust), might be a better approach.
For example, I'm not flagging those Booking Team posts, even though I try to expose it. I'm willing to attempt to win that battle with words, but flags are sort of like SteemIt's version of force, and I don't want to be that aggressive. Attacking what someone perceives as their property (pending rewards), even if it is not their property, is going to be perceived as force, particularly when it is economic property.
Plus, full disclosure, I feel that would be a drop in the bucket and therefore a waste of my VP, and I likely couldn't handle the retaliation.
Ps - I really enjoyed catching up on your replies today, thank you.
Yes I'm enjoying our exchanges too, the challenge is welcome.
Your first scenarios I would still file under "you shouldn't be in a position to directly determine the value of your own posts or comments". Regardless of how you feel you should be rewarded I am firmly of the opinion that in a social network these values should be assigned by others.
And still, as I said elsewhere, I do not consider flags to be violence or an attack. People can view pending rewards as their property but that's similar to viewing gambling winnings your property when it appears the betted on event is going your way. I'll continue to do everything I can to highlight that pending rewards are not actual rewards and I still also think we need a front end change here to highlight this (it would be really easy to do).
If we go ahead with @smackdown.kitty flags we have to accept the possibility someone will create Dawg.Bot 😅 If that happens we'll roll with it and I hope the larger community will get involved in whatever way they are moved to.
I don't hear anything here I haven't already discussed with you.
"Regardless of how you feel you should be rewarded I am firmly of the opinion that in a social network these values should be assigned by others."
Well, there's the rub. Steem isn't a social media platform, only Steemit is. Even Steemit isn't really just a social media platform, is it? I put $45,000 (I may not have bought at the optimal time though =/) into Steemit as an "investor", given where that puts me in vested, I'd likely have stock with voting shares were this a company. What social media platform can we compare to that is even remotely analogous? That does mean I deserve to determine some of the rewards, and it says so right in the white paper. I'm providing value, huge value, to those that want to cash out. Even if I, hypothetically, self-upvote spam, that is rightly considered a payment for liquidity that I provide, especially in the case of those with capital losses. We can quibble about numbers on what that is worth, but it is worth something.
If I had put in $0, then I agree with your premise, I wouldn't deserve to "decide" part of my posts value. But I do deserve that when I am in the top 5% or top 1% of vested, in a proportionate amount - and that's why I agree with the hard fork changing vests from exponential to linear, even though I think I'd be benefiting from having the old way more, personally. Your argument applies much better to minnows, than to whales (or orcas, or whatever), but there's already not much of a problem with minnows. And again, I am assuming the posts being upvoted are NOT SPAM or 3-4 words - I'm assuming these users are all at least self-upvoting reasonably whole-assed content. The liquidity value is just another bonus wherein it could be possible to both be self-upvoting spam comments AND providing value, because your capital loss is funding others cash-out because you bought into a crash or downtrend.
As it stands, minnows already really can't abuse it, so I still don't see the problem. Nor do I think flagging them with a bot will help.
I just posted what I think is a much better solution in my newest blog entry - give us a flagging power separate from voting power. That way, we could make a dent in spam posts as a community without sacrificing value we can give to others (or ourselves), curation rewards, etc. You can't make it directly financially counterproductive for people to try to clean up spam - even though the rewards get redistributed on a macro-level, on the micro level of the individual user, they pretty much just lose that voting power if they flag.
Again, I think this would be many times more useful than flagging bots, I'm worried about naming and shaming which almost always causes...secondary effects, and I would love to get into the Trending page and flag the heck out of the spam-junk mail that's in there, but if I do that, I can't vote for my commenters on my articles, or my own blog posts to try to get them to Hot, or even you while we have this discussion.
You are completely wrong. Steem is a social media platform. You cannot remove the social media functions from the cryptocurrency functions because they are tightly bound together as the blockchain itself. This is not even to mention that the tradable coin gets part of it's value from it's distribution within the context of social media. Honestly I'm surprised that you have this opinion.
"Steemit" is just the company and front end branding. You are not a Steemit investor unless you bought shares in Steemit Inc., otherwise you are a Steem investor and social media user.
Because there is no precedent for Steem does not make it not a social network, it just makes it a pioneer!
I've read your latest blog entry, and glad to see different solutions (and the honorable mention 😉), though I don't think the incentives are there for that particular idea.
I think we may be reaching the end of any profitable discussion because, as is often the case, the root of our disagreement is becoming apparent. You are happy with the recent boost in your ability to allocate resources to yourself to grow your investment. I certainly understand this position, and I agree that it is at least plausible it can grow the platform by attracting people who would want this.
However it is not the kind of platform I want, and I'm more in line with the idea that the investment will grow anyway at a reasonable rate with basic activity (i.e. phoning it in) and potentially a lot with exemplary activity, and that we should keep the incentives for social engagement high priority.
"You are completely wrong. Steem is a social media platform. You cannot remove the social media functions from the cryptocurrency functions because they are tightly bound together as the blockchain itself. This is not even to mention that the tradable coin gets part of it's value from it's distribution within the context of social media. Honestly I'm surprised that you have this opinion."
I'm not wrong by definition. I don't know why you'd get so...weird about this. I am right by definition in exactly what I said. Steemit is NOT just a social media platform, and it not comparable directly to what we call Social Media today. There is a lot more going on with Steemit and it is therefore much more complex than FB or Twitter.
Steem is NOT a social media platform, it is a cryptocurrency that, among other potential uses, powers Steemit.
You are totally wrong here:
"Steem is a social media platform."
I mean, just ask anyone. You are wrong by definition. I don't get most of this reply. You've totally ignored the value of providing liquidity and assumed I just want to assign myself rewards.
I don't even want to address any of your other points, because you claimed I said things I didn't say.
"You are completely wrong. Steem is a social media platform."
No, no it's not. I can't believe you are arguing basic terminology against the white paper.
What do you think makes Steemit special? For most people, the rewards (I like the anti-censorship). Who provides the value in cashing out rewards? Not posters, they are sellers. Only buyers. Only capital.
Demonize capital and you get communism. Equality of outcome. It seems like this may be what you want?
Why won't you even acknowledge the value of capital? Do you know what would happen without investors? What's the opposite of "to da moon"?
What do you think the honest value of a token, in USD, would be if only content posters had it, because you have utterly driven away capital? About as much as Reddit karma, that's what. The order book will be all red.
Well I'll do you the dignity of a response.
Steem was always designed as a social media network, it's right there in the whitepaper. It is evident, I have nothing to prove here.
I don't know what you mean by "weird" but I have to assume that is just a put down and ignore.
I emphasise that you do want to assign rewards to yourself, you cannot deny this. That's not to say you do not want other things.
I'm forced to update as you're doing a lot of edits. I'm not demonizing capital, you need to accept that. I am not in favor of increasing the reward share of those with capital though via increased self rewarding. Equality of outcome is not the goal, never has been.
I acknowledge the value of capital but didn't think it was needed as nothing I've said has contradicted that.
"I acknowledge the value of capital but didn't think it was needed as nothing I've said has contradicted that."
Ok, I feel that your statement that I should not get to assign a proportionate amount of rewards to my stake as specifically not acknowledging the value of capital. I used the example of voting shares in a company as an analogy.
Could you reconcile those statements?
"I am not in favor of increasing the reward share of those with capital though via increased self rewarding."
Then why would people want to buy this token? Are you familiar with many assets that people buy that do nothing except give away money to other people? Do we really want nothing but speculators looking for capital gains, dumping in and out in manias?
Why power up $50k into my account if I am an author, then? If I can't vote my post $6 and put it in HoT, why would I want to invest, or want the token at all? Why not just perpetually power down, slam the token value to 2 cents, until the platform dies because it pays .0003 cents per word?
Have you noticed the enormous correlation in post payouts going up (because investors are giving the token value) and the daily author numbers moving up x10?
Our problem now is curation (and it not being that rewarding). I suspect there is a lot of quality content coming out every day.
Going to try to post a few more supporting links here:
Witness #8 OKs self-voting:
https://steemit.com/steem/@clayop/no-more-fear-on-self-voting
"Overcoming Fear on Self-voting
But is it really bad, especially in linear-based system? Assuming everyone is doing self-voting, a person who is holding 10% Steem Power will earn approximately 10% of contents rewards. If one is holding 1%, he/she will get 1%, and 50% will get 50%. It is literally selfish, but a self-voter doesn't over-use his/her power more than one owns."
These are good, economic justifications here. Don't feel like looking up more atm.