Idea: Rethinking the Voting Power system for a better Steem network
In discussing the recent epidemic of self-voting abuse with @anyx, I remembered a possible solution. I first discussed this in 2016, so it's nothing new. Please note that I'm not a developer, designer or economist at all, so I could be way off. But as an active curator I see this as such a debilitating problem that I'm compelled to go way out of my comfort zone.
The perceived problem with the old 40 votes per day voting power target was that the bots had an advantage over human curators. To fix that, the voting power target was reduced to 10 per day. However, this only served to discourage active human curators from curating, and instead encourage casual self-upvoters to stop curating others' posts and save all their voting power for that massive overpowered self-upvote. It's a disaster, and I don't see any evidence to the contrary. The only benefit would be fewer people have VP at 100%, but that seems rather superficial.
So, the objective would be -
- Remove any friction from engaged curation. Curators enjoy voting without stressing about voting power.
- Penalize bots or otherwise excessive curation.
- Control self-upvote abuse.
- Democratize curation.
How many votes do active curators make?
Hint - it's a lot more than 10. Judging by the most influential human curators on SteemDB, the answer is between 50 and 120. Day after day, it's the very same pattern. Looking through other curators I admire, I have come to an average of 75 votes per day. Let's consider this as an average of activity, this would put us at 0.1%. Anyway, the point of this is not to find an actual number, but that by looking at the data it'll be clear to see where the outliers are - those are the bots. In the data there, it seems like beyond 200 they are most certainly bots, or outliers.
Inverting the voting power cost curve
Currently, the voting power cost decreases the lower your VP gets. At 100%, a vote will reduce your VP to 98%. At 50%, it'll reduce just 1% to 49%, and at 0.5%, it'll go down to 0.49%. The end result is you can keep voting as much as you want without any decrease in overall influence.
But what if you invert it? Note, that the following numbers are just placeholders. Up to the 75 votes per day, there'll be a minimal cost to voting. This will mean active curators will be encourage to curate, and experienced curators' votes will matter. Curators can vote freely without constantly stressing over voting power. That drains the whole fun out of curation!
After 75 votes and up to 200 votes, the voting power cost will start accelerating. After 200 votes, it'll tank hard, so the outliers are heavily penalized. And yes, maybe VP could drop all the way down to 0% - someone voting 2,000 times a day is probably not up to any good. But maybe it can flatten back out once it drops to 1%. Not important.
(PS: This may mean bots will want to split up into different accounts, though I'm not certain that would help given linear rewards. Either way, it's one more barrier added compared to currently.)
Capping influence
Currently, the VP spent is tied directly to Rshares generated. So, a 2% VP cost will give 2% Rshares. Of course, with an inverse curve, this will be problematic. So the simple solution would be decoupling the two, and capping Rshares influence. So even if the bots' costs 2% VP, the influence is only 0.25% equivalent or whatever the figure is. Voting strengths will continue as always, so a 10% vote will be 0.025% equivalent. I'm sure there's a more elegant solution here, but this shouldn't be a major issue.
At the beginning end of the curve, spending 0.25% versus 2% doesn't mean a 1/8th reduction, as everyone will also be spending that much. So, the net effect will be zero. The difference is won't be able to ration your VP as significantly for a massive vote. Since the rationing almost always seems to be for self-voting or collusive voting, that's a net positive.
Conclusion
If implemented correctly, this should solve many problems and offer added benefits.
- With engaged curators curating actively, the self-upvotes will be drowned out from the reward pool.
- Self-upvoters themselves will be encouraged to curate other posts instead of their own, as voting for others doesn't have such a high cost.
- They'll also be encouraged to vote for comments due to the lower cost of each vote.
- The rewards will be more distributed and democratic as each vote is worth less. Currently one whale can easily trend an article despite the linear rewards. Of course, this means self-voting and other voting abuse will be less costly.
- Bots and outlier voters will reduced to irrelevance. They'll have to contain their voting to a similar magnitude as human voters.
Please let me know your thoughts on the solution. If you like it, please shout out loud, get witnesses' and developers' attention. Thanks.
PS: You could also Promote this post, so it gets some exposure. I have promoted it with SBD 138 for a start.
I'm sorry, but as long as there are curation rewards, this will never be true of bots. I promise you that no matter how convoluted you make the voting power curve, no matter how nonlinear, no matter how pro-human - because it's math and money driving the show, it will always be possible to automate optimal voting.
Your proposal says something like "75-ish votes per day should be penalty-free, and more than that come with a severe inefficiency penalty." Then the bot optimization strategy is easy: figure out how how big an optimally-sized vote should be, and spread SP out among as many accounts as necessary to make each of those accounts' first 75 votes the right size. Done. Benefit to humans negated, but with the added baggage that you've given me an incentive to split my SP among several accounts, which doesn't help anybody.
In which case, the bot is no longer an outlier. As you know, I have no problem with non-abusive bots. Indeed, around here more humans are abusive than bots.
I'm kinda agin 'em. I do not value the opinion of a bot. I may value the opinion of a person. Regardless of my disdain for the opinions of bots, those opinions devalue my opinions by competing with me, and with other people too.
Bots may have uses, but competing with humans in valuing content is not an appropriate one, imho. Dunno how this might be achieved (I am not a coder), but I reckon it oughta be.
No matter how I see it there will always be ways to game the rules. I would propose Steemit to become more "Facebook" like. Do you see bots on Facebook? Maybe, but not as rampant compared to Steemit. The best way is to remove bots totally, if we want to read higher quality posts on Steemit.
That's more because there's a) no financial incentive, and b) it's a privacy oriented network.
I'm curious. Should we place the emphasis on maximizing financial gains or should we prioritize value creation?
It seems to me that only by creating value first will we be able to reap financial rewards. If Steemit is invested for the long term, it should remove bots that hurts its potential for future growth.
While not the most elegant of solutions, it does present an alternative way to look at the Curation Process. Maybe it would be easier to just not allow people to upvote their own items and instead allow 5 Article Bumps per day per article for each user. That way the self-voting doesn't dilute the product into worthlessness while allowing newer Steemians the possibility of having their posts seen more often than otherwise possible.
I have 245 followers currently and what I find most disconcerting is that I get only the rarest of upvotes. Now that my self-upvotes (which provide nearly all of my rewards for most of my articles) have become less significant, I have less desire to go through the trouble of writing on here. That would be a shame if Steemit began to lose users because of this issue. If my articles could be bumped up without having to be promoted using my earnings (which I've done unsuccessfully), I might have the possibility of having other users participate in them and pssibly have a whale or 2 see them and upvote.
So, as for me, even an inelegant solution is worth looking at as it's something that's being proposed to make the Community better.
There's an important utility to self-upvotes. It allows advertisers to power up and promote their products etc, which could be an important revenue stream for Steem in the future. But yes, it could be limited.
Monetizing articles is definitely a way to make money, but does it kind of go against the normal thought process for most Steemians?
So in summary: self upvotes bump as if they increased the reward, but don't actually increase the reward. They can still come out of the users voting power. Interesting idea.
It's a good one! I missed that detail.
People can just use a second account to up vote their own stuff. There are always workarounds to BARRIERS such as this. I prefer to just not follow people that up vote their own comments.
EDIT: I was fine for the up vote for visibility when it was a few cents... yet people doing it $8, $10 for their comment when there is nothing remotely close to that is clearly not about visibility.
I'm still new here and my vote does not count for much, but i do want to vote more then 10 times a day. That is making the choice of who i up vote very difficult! Good post thank you!
I think some way of making vote diversity count. If all your vote-percent-to-recipient ratio is over a certain amount in a day, their voting power should attract a penalty, too much and it could negatively impact reputation. Unsociable behaviour needs a disincentive.
Good idea! Probably a bit complicated, but I think this can be implemented. Vote power costs are more if you vote on the same people over and over again.
Yes. Maybe also the curation reward is lessened if you've voted on that person before within a certain time frame.
That'll happen automatically, curation rewards decrease with voting power.
I really like your idea.
Under current rules more and more people will start saving all their votes for themselves, ignoring engagement with others.
If I understand it right, in your system you power up your vote by voting on people. Then, you can spend your high power vote on whoever you want, including yourself. But you had to at least vote other people along the way (meaning: actually ENGAGE the platform). Not bad... not bad at all.
That's not really what I meant - you don't gain voting power, it's just that it reduces slowly up to a certain point. Personally, I quite like your idea, but the problem is abusers will be more incentivized to keep voting on their own spam :)
@liberosist. I think my posts seem to be automatically upvoted. It may be a default setting. I will look into it. Haven't been around long enough to give much of an opinion on how to best address these issues. Regardless, I do appreciate this post. Regardless of outcome, it's clear you have only the best interest in mind.
Really simple solution to use your problem as the solution: Create a bot that rewards those who up-vote themselves fairly. Another bot that statistically finds unnatural swarms of circular up-voting and punishes.
Let's make the number of votes per day a witness setting, so we don't have to hardfork to change it. It's already been changed twice now with hardforks.
Good idea! Especially as the community is growing rapidly. When HF19 was proposed, there were 5,000 comments and posts per day. Now there are nearly 100,000.
There is 20x more content to go through, yet the target remains at 10? How does that make sense?
Yeah, there is 20x more content but I think the content is getting worse and worse. It´s becoming more and more Facebook like. People are posting rubbish all the time to get noticed, this makes it really hard for good content creators to get noticed. Especially when they are upvoting themselves...
I think we need to expect that most posts aren't going to be of the same quality that early adopters are capable of. While I detest the spammy posts as much as anyone, they're easy to ignore, and will be easier when communities get implemented.
When Steemit really becomes a place where RL friends and families are using it to keep in touch, a la Fakebook, then those rubbish posts will have place.
I resteemed, the issues in here must be resolved. Also the content should also be rewarded or it will be just like a numbers game only in here.
I am finding it difficult also to get things going, the system is complicated.
Have you checked out the Minnow Support Project? Some great people have undertaken to help folks get things rolling.
Otherwise, the key to getting to people that find what you say compelling is doing exactly what you are doing here: commenting relevantly on their posts in your own voice. In time you will find others that speak your language, and that you also find interesting.
I already had found minnows support, they are awesome. There are also ways and tools here I saw that can greatly help newcomers like me so it's not that hard anymore. We just have to write our world and use this community as it is intended. Thank you.
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@liberosist I think that bots management is the best way to make the human element of Steemit count. If not, it will turn into Instagram which is, in my opinion, the largest collection of bots that if given the ability to "feel", could be the start of SkyNet.
Confession, I used like bots on Instagram lol. Using bots was like the only way to break through to a decent sized following. Likes are near worthless now on Instagram; you need thousands of them. Instagram has become very diluted.