RE: Why I Advise Against Linear Reward
Superlinear reward encourages some curation as
It doesn't and if you read the above section of the whitepaper carefully, no such claim is made:
money must be distributed in a nonlinear manner
This states a necessary but not sufficient condition. The white paper does not claim that superlinear alone is sufficient to achieve curation, in fact it states precisely the opposite because it explains the need for downvotes to prevent collusion (a somewhat technical term, but in this context, it means more SP working together to increase the payout of content above its merits; somewhat different from the implied English meaning since there is no requirement for multiple actors, only an increased amount of SP working to self-reward).
Unfortunately the white paper got some of this wrong. It describes the crab bucket model where stakeholders are supposed to pull down others who try to collude to extract rewards. However, in the real world, we have seen that most stakeholders would rather see to their own reward earnings rather than 'waste' vote power pulling others down. The psychology may be valid, but the cost of downvoting is just too high for psychology to override economics here.
Crowdsourced downvotes as described by @yabapmatt also distribute rewards in a non-linear fashion, as follows. If 100% upvote and no one downvotes, the reward is 100% relative to the amount of voting power used. If 80% upvote and 20% downvote, the reward is 75% relative to the amount of voting power used. This is non-linear and satisfies the necessary condition of the white paper. This assumes that downvotes don't deplete upvote power as in the @cervantes/@kevonwong/etc. proposal. If they do then the reward is 60%, but either way, still non-linear.
We think that is a better approach. I wouldn't flat out rule out some superlinear (indeed we have one at my urging in HF20 with the new treatment of dust votes at the very low end), but n^2 doesn't look like a good solution and other solutions are underdeveloped (and, quite possibly, unnecessary).
I really appreciate your inputs!
I implied this as it's implied by the whitepaper.
This isn't a binary thing. It's part of some very complex ever-changing dynamics. At some point, the bulk of the stakeholders even agreed to refrain from voting to a large extent forgoing a lot of rewards.
Very interesting solution. I hadn't understood it correctly so I'm very grateful for the way you've described it. My first impression is that it's a solution I could very be in favor of.
We have two and half years of experience across various other tweaks in the reward system to see basically the same result. Stakeholders, by and large, don't want to waste their valuable earning potential on downvotes or not voting (there are always exceptions but they are precisely that).
Yes it was me (along with abit) who organized and promoted that so I'm quite aware of it. Having been there, I can tell you it wasn't sustainable. Even if abit and I were willing to continue doing what we were doing indefinitely, the other major stakeholders were not, and in the place of the largest stakeholders, the next largest were starting to do the same thing.
That sort of crab bucket approach does not work if downvotes are too expensive. Other than that, it could very well work. I've even said that with cheap downvotes n^2 could work. It might produce different results than what many in the community want in terms of reward distribution, but it might be (probably would be) a whole lot better than what we saw with n^2 and no cheap downvotes.
I agree with most of the points you've made and our disagreements aren't fundamental disagreements.
I wanted to state my truth as clear as possible. The selfless are losing some ROI to the selfish in a flawed system.
Selfishness is not a long term successful approach. Since it's not sustainable. The selfless are losing in the short term frame yes. But they can build up stronger relationships that lasts for a life time. In the end the goal is to use Tokens to produce higher leverage by investing in human brains that think big and long term.
This space needs to evolve into digital jobs eventually if you truly want to maximise ROI. At the moment since it's such a new field everyone is just trying to do some blogging with random stuff. More organisation is needed. Niches + Community systems. And moderators that own various Niches would be an interesting experiment. People focusing on niches that they love. Therefore everyone is getting more of what they want.
Thank you for the discussion.
the only get rich here is the bots. that's the reality, just saying