Why I Advise Against Linear Reward
This post is a letter addressed to the top 20 witnesses as well as Steemit Inc's CEO. I had intended to send it to them first before publishing it. After reading one of @cervantes post I've decided to publish the letter directly.
I'm still very much interested in what would be the answers to the second question posed in my letter. For this reason, I might send this letter and kindly ask them if they would be willing to answer underneath this post.
A Letter To The Top 20 Witnesses
Hi!
This letter will be sent to Ned Scott, Steemit Inc's CEO and all top 20 witnesses. I'll publish this letter and your answers in the coming 72 hours.
I'm writing with the humble pursuit of improving Steem. I'll ask you 2 questions about linear rewards and provide my thoughts on the subject.
The original Steem Whitepaper states:
"If every voter defects by voting for themselves then no currency will end up distributed and the currency as a whole will fail to gain network effect."
It then argues:
"In order to realign incentives and discourage individuals from simply voting for themselves, money must be distributed in a nonlinear manner."
1. Do you agree with this statement?
2. If not, can you provide a refutation? (Preferably, one made public prior to the implementation of linear reward.)
The whitepaper's full argument is linked below.
Explanations
Ever since I've first read the Steem Whitepaper in April 2016, I've been intrigued as to why nonlinear rewards had been chosen. (As an aside, why less than 2 as an exponent wasn't chosen was partially explained in one of @vandeberg's comment.)
I had my reservations about linear rewards since then. Yet back when linear rewards were introduced, I've failed to fully wrap my head around the whitepaper's argument and thus I failed to express as many concerns as I wish I had.
Today, I'm convinced linear rewards are fundamentally flawed and I've been in support of n^2 since at least November 2017. I'm unaware of any attempt by Steemit Inc to refute the original whitepaper's argument against linear reward.
Steemit Inc Argues Against Linear Rewards
The last time Steemit Inc meaningfully argued for or against linear rewards, they've argued against linear rewards. Here's what the @steemitblog says:
Ideal Curve
In a world with honest people who don't vote on themselves to get "free money for nothing", a simple linear curve, aka n would produce a 1 share 1 vote proportional payout. This is the blue line and shows the ideal situation.
Realistic Curve
Unfortunately, we live in a world where people will attempt to game the system by voting for themselves. If everyone voted for themselves then the result would be simple interest payments and have no economic impact. We believe that groups are more honest in aggregate than individuals. We also believe that whales (accounts with over $500K Steem Power) have more to lose and are easier to police than the multitude of smaller accounts.
Excerps from the Steem original whitepaper:
I've partially reproduced the second part of the whitepaper's argument below. The full argument can be found under "Distributing Currency".
[Even though n^2,]
"creates financial incentive to collude where everyone votes on one thing and then divides the reward equally among themselves"
[And under n^2]
"Larger shareholders... have even greater incentive to defect by voting for themselves than they had under a linear distribution."
[those who have a large investment in a community]
"... also have the most to lose by attempting to game the voting system for themselves. It would be like the CEO of a company deciding to stop paying salaries so he could pocket all of the profits. Everyone would leave to work for other companies and the company would become worthless, leaving the CEO bankrupt rather than wealthy.
Fortunately, any work that is getting a large concentration of votes is also gaining the most scrutiny (publicity). Through the addition of negative-voting it is possible for many smaller stakeholders to nullify the voting power of collusive groups or defecting large stakeholders. Furthermore, large-stakeholders have more to lose if the currency falls in value due to abuse than they might gain by voting for themselves. In fact, honest large stakeholders are likely to be more effective by policing abuse and using negative voting than they would be by voting for smaller contributions."
Commentary
Linear rewards leave selfish upvoters at an advantage. Overall they can engage in the bare minimum amount of work (exclusive self-upvote) maximizing their ROI/influence/wealth, while the rest will inevitably see them diminish. (This "work" can easily be fully automated.)
Flagging doesn't solve the issue, as the flagged rewards are simply returned to the reward pool for anyone to grab, selfish and selfless upvoters alike. (Also, as the value of Steem grows, the incentives for greater ROI grows.)
Superlinear rewards don't prevent all abuses but aren't fundamentally flawed. Investors set Steem's price not philanthropists. ROI is what they are looking for not how much they are giving away.
Conclusion
I've rehashed the original whitepaper's argument against linear rewards of which I haven't seen any valid rebuttal. I've asked 2 questions from which I hope a clearer picture can emerge to the benefit of everyone.
Steem's stakes are huge for all of us. It would have been a lot less risks for me to accept the current status quo but I needed to stand up for what I'm convinced of and for which I haven't seen any valid rebuttal.
Edit: I'm opened to any solutions that could resolve the fundamental issues stated in my post.
Source
Image
https://www.flickr.com/photos/159526894@N02/28405889658
Steem Original Whitepaper
An incentivized, blockchain-based social media platform.
[Daniel Larimer, Ned Scott, Valentine Zavgorodnev, Benjamin Johnson, James Calfee, Michael Vandeberg, March 2016]
https://steemit.com/steem/@liondani/steem-whitepaper-download
https://app.box.com/s/hmq5p0skko40vi55f8pi4j631sqe3los (PDF, props to @liondani)
November Comment
The issue of engagement and of distributing wealth in proportion with perceived quality of contribution is real and very important. However the proposed solution is simplistic and has been argued against already.
Now after a number of months with N^2 rewards (back in 2016) and more than a year with linear rewards, instead of "writing a letter" and then pumping it to trending in order to start a polemic, why not use the blockchain data and do a comparative analysis?
Extract the blockchain data from the 2 periods and look at whatever indicators you think most relevant (wealth distribution for instance under n^2 and under linear). Compare the figures: was it better with n^2 ? Or is it better with linear ? Do a regression analysis if you have to, do covariance analysis if it helps and come with mathematical proof that one or another is better for the goal that you state (which I share and I believe most people share)
I will in some very simplistic way prove the person doing the less amount of work currently have the best ROI. Those who engage ithe least in "proof-of-brain".
That will show that the current system falls short. It does not, in any way, condone nonlinear rewards. Just because we change something that's "not good enough" does not mean whatever we replace it with will automatically be "better". It can very well be ... even worse !
Posted using Partiko Android
This comment is supported by $8.06 @tipU upvote funded by @sorin.cristescu :)
@tipU voting service guide | STEEM Monsters Lottery | Quick SBD <-> STEEM Exchange | For investors.
I agree with the above statement; however, I don't feel that is the correct question to be asking here. The problem we are trying to solve here is not people "voting for themselves", it's how to properly incentivize real curation efforts as compared to automated "gaming" of the reward system.
In my opinion, no change in numbers or algorithm will achieve that goal. No matter what we set the reward curve to, or the curation percentage, it will always be possible to take advantage of the algorithm to gain optimal rewards via automated voting over manual curation.
The only way I see as a realistic possibility to effectively combat that is a crowdsourcing approach (as compared to an algorithmic approach). Currently the crowdsourcing aspect of Steem rewards is clearly broken due to the extreme disincentive to downvote, which is why I am strongly in favor of something like a separate downvote pool which is being discussed.
Once that is in place, I think the rest of the reward system should be made as simple as possible for people to understand, as this will help the crowdsourcing effort. That is why I am against changing both the reward curve and the curation percentage. I feel those changes will end up being gamed just the same as the current system is now, and on top of that they make things more complicated for users to understand which will hurt the effective crowdsourcing of rewards which I hope we can improve significantly.
I should probably make a more detailed post about my thoughts on this topic when I have some time.
The first thing that popped to mind as well to me was that it was not the relevant question. Interesting.
I have a doubt when it comes to downvoting.
I think downvoting must be part of the system, however, I am worried about a culture of downvoting. Downvotes are perceived much much stronger than upvotes, so if everyone downvotes a lot this may backlash.
It works on youtube though.
I think that's mostly because downvoting is so rare nowadays, and so financially disincentivized, that when it happens it's a really big deal. It will likely take some time for people to adjust to the change, but after a while if it becomes a commonplace thing (like on youtube as you mentioned) then it won't be a big deal anymore.
I downvote over-rewarded posts all the time. I leave a little comment giving my reasons. I sometimes a get a downvote back on the comment. I use decline payout on my comments for protection. It works pretty well.
If they downvote my comment, they are using Voting Power on me instead of themselves. They are inflicting damage on themselves without even thinking about it.
there is no downvoting on youtube, there is only like and dislike, and report - here on Steemit any whale or deepstate sponsored individual can ruin someone's rep by big downvotes, seen it when @berniesanders did it to me
https://steemit.com/steem/@transisto/improving-negative-curation-a-downvote-button-vs-flag-explained-condenser
https://steemit.com/steem/@transisto/separate-downvoting-power-pool-concept-visualized
The problem I have with the incentivized flags is that rather than be used to crowd-source for quality etc, they will become ridiculous vendetta tools. Can't really claim that the average maturity of the platform is high as if it was, a lot of the problems wouldn't exist in the first place.
I agree that the reward system should be as simple as possible, at least for the beginner stages as the current barriers to entry are already so high due to the complexity of the entire process. The complexity can still exist of course but the average user need not feel they have to worry about it at sign up unless thy are investing in.
I think that's all part of the crowdsourcing. If someone is using downvotes as an attack against otherwise valuable content, then the community can step in and upvote it. Often I've found that people who are the target of unfair downvoting can appeal to the community and come out ahead of where they started in terms of support and votes.
Also, i'm not necessarily saying that what i'm proposing will work, i don't think anyone knows that for sure. But my guess is that it would work better than adjusting numbers in some algorithm, and i think the experiment of the Steem platform as a whole is about crowdsourcing rewards more than algorithmic rewards, so I would like to give it a real shot.
It becomes a strategy to get upvotes as I think we have seen utilized enough.
Don't get me wrong, I am pretty open to experimentation here as long as there is the understanding that it is going to keep getting experimented on to find a point that is best for the community as a whole. No solution is ever going to be perfect so in my eyes, the experimentation doesn't end.
Flags aren't really incentivized in this proposal (we don't know of a good method to do that even if we wanted to), they just stop being so costly. You still earn essentially nothing by downvoting. Your other content does go up every so slightly slightly in payout all else being equal, but it is quite negligible (and your other content too can be downvoted if don't have sufficient merit)
Bad choice of words. Less-disincentivized. Don't get me wrong, I am in support of trying it as I would like to see how it plays out. I understand that people fear flags and that should change (my first flag was from you a very long time ago :D ) and I would hope that it would make people think twice or up their standards before boosting nonsense.
There is no point discussing forever something that can be trialed quite cheaply. Work or not, either way, we would have better knowledge going forward instead of only predictions.
Yeah, as I've seen the back and forth on this topic, it seems to me that every proposal needs a downvoting component for it (and I do like that you say 'crowd-sourced' here, that does seem apt) to work, so I am pretty much in agreement with you here.
Superlinear reward encourages some curation as opposed to the current system that incentivizes exclusive self-upvotes. Good or bad can only be determined by the person doing the curation.
It doesn't and if you read the above section of the whitepaper carefully, no such claim is made:
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
I do not understand how it encourages curation.
If we have nonlinear rewards my upvotes are worthless unless I upvote the most popular content. So it supresses curation even more so, as my voice is suppressed unless I follow the crowd.
Right now my vote as an example is worth $2. I get to give this to anyone I like. Much easier for me to actually curate and reward what I find valuable.
This is what I want to see answered. Superlinear isn't magically going to make curation happen.
i think the assumption is that people will converge into what's valuable... but as the old saying says: beautify is in the eye of the beholder and to apply it to steem...
One man's shitpost is another man's gold..
When you say "people will converge", you mean when things are superlinear? This isn't going to be true, unless you mean to say "a few top whales will converge". And that's the troubling part for me.
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I've long come to grips with the fact that trending was never amazing... it was different because of how young the project was.
Look at whaleshares, look at the amount of rewards being given... early adopters are potentially killing it... and its linear!
watch a year from now people over there complaining about the same things they do here.
Nonlinear rewards can be gamed by dividing your SP up into a bunch of different accounts. you're not going to stop self upvoting. What we really need is account based voting with accounts verified by oracles, which is coming anyway I believe.
Incorrect as pointed out by @smooth.
It may, but my point is that I would prefer to keep the reward algorithm as simple as possible, and allow the community to regulate it from there. So if the community decides that excessive self-upvoting is bad, they can downvote people who do that, which then removes the incentive that is there now.
Flagged rewards are simply returned to the reward pool and as stated in my post those flagged rewards are up for grab by selfish and selfless upvoters alike, leaving selfish upvoters at an advantage.
Not true. Those second round of selfish voters are also more likely to be downvoted. You have to look at this as a large economy, not individual steps. The first downvote of a selfish voter puts the rewards back in the pool but that doesn't mean selfish and selfless voters are on then equal footing. The downvotes can continue to follow selfish voters indefinitely.
The result is likely to be an equilibrium with far less selfish voting, not only because selfish voters get downvoted, returning those rewards to the pool, but because crowdsourced downvotes change the incentives on selfish voting in the first place. It will not be perfect (nohting is) but it will likely be far better, with more for the pool going to value adding activities.
True but under linear reward, the rewards returned would represent a growing % of the reward pool with ever-growing incentive to defect. If downvotes are crowdsourced my statement is irrelevant.
That entire statement makes no sense. The returned rewards represent either the same % of the reward pool (if all returned) or a smaller % (if only a portion are returned). There is no way for it to increase. I have no idea what sort of convoluted reasoning has led you to conclude this.
I've cut corners while explaining my point.
Let's say someone's flag or vote was first worth an infinitesimal part of the reward pool well after the most extreme case imaginable where every single vote is counteracted, well that infinitesimal vote would now control 100% of the pool.
The incentives to defect become greater as more flags are given because flagers become "fewer" or spent and the potential rewards greater.
It's a very convoluted way to make my point and I'm not sure how sound my explanation of it is but hopefully, it's clear enough.
It's good that you are calling me on my half-baked explanation that I had given. I knew when I wrote my answer it wasn't really clear at best and possibly didn't mean much at worst.
They're up for grab for the next least selfish self-voters. The most likely contender for countering selfvoting is independent flagging pool along with burning of flagged reward, which I guess due to technical implementation difficulty doesn't have much traction.
Indeed. It's a loophole with serious issues as I've stated.
Leaving the rest for grab for the next least selfish self-voters leaving the same loophole open as I understand it.
"next least selfish" = Not selfish.
Not sure how you understand it otherwise.
It doesn't put potential abusers at a disadvantage.
If you don't agree with people self-voting themselves then down-vote them.
Here's a non-linear system for you.
Also like @Blocktrades pointed out, Curation reward made the system non-linear. Since HF20 (first 15min forgoing of curation reward to author) there are huge economic forces at play for getting a piece of the curation which is acting to counter profit of self-voters.
BTW you're about 1 year too late to argue again't a change that is already been implemented.
I know what you meant but your title seems to completely disregard decisions and the evolution that took place during the last year.
Steem is always evolving and changes aren't set in stone.
Downvoted for pushing your post about 400$ above the top post.
I hadn't calculated how much I've put into the bots. Also, there are some organic votes. Could you refund me that I send to @promotbot?
Refunded, One solution to the problem of having your post at the top for the next 3 days would be to make it dynamic by updating it to maybe include the best reply you're received.
I'll consider updating my post. I didn't have maligned intentions. Using bid-bot is quite fastidious and I simply wanted it to be up there not way up there like it ended up. I used all the bots and should have been more careful and calculated the total...
Flagged for abusing bid bots.
In order to realign incentives and discourage individuals from simply voting for themselves, money must be distributed in a nonlinear manner.Which implies that
Self voting is a losing strategy if curve is non-linearBut then... if we just look at what happens under n^x with x>1 reward schemes, we realize that actually, if everyone self-votes, then this statement is false. It's true for the minnows who have less than the 'average stake', but it's false for all the whales who will earn more than under linear rewards. So 1. False
Under linear rewards, if everyone self-votes and we ignore witness rewards, STEEM's distribution becomes similar to a 100% PoS system like many others, which is arguably more fair (self-voting is only a break-even strategy, not a winning one).
I believe the way everyone thinks about this issue to be biased by steemit developers. The way STEEM has been coded makes the need for a 'reward curve'. What if we just changed the distribution algorithm in the first place instead of wanting to change the 'curve' that plugs into the existing algorithm?
Under superlinear the majority of rewards are distributed through consensus not self-upvote. This is what we had observed. You can verify this through old screenshots of steemwhales.
So you are saying that basically before linear rewards, people were self-voting less than now? That seems true from observation, but a lot of other economical changes happened at the same time than linear rewards. The powerdown time was changed for example too.
Also, I suppose you consider bidbot delegation schemes to be the same than self-voting, and the bidbot industry started to exist because of linear rewards (it became easier to code), however I don't see how they would go away today if we re-changed, they would just adapt their code, and as they are the biggest whales on the network today, they would profit the most from the change.
So I'm not even sure the observation is linked with the HF17 (or was it 18?) econ changes, maybe it's just that something else developped at the same time that turned the network toxic and induced people to defend their stake by self-voting more.
Somewhat.
I think they would, as the bigger player would have incentives to downvote the posts with bid-bot votes and put an end to the practice. That's how I see it. It doesn't mean that's how it would play out. It's a very big unknown.
In order to realign incentives and discourage individuals from simply voting for themselves, money must be distributed in a nonlinear manner.
Which implies that Self voting is a losing strategy if curve is non-linear
But then... if we just look at what happens under n^x with x>1 reward schemes, we realize that actually, if everyone self-votes, then this statement is false. It's true for the minnows who have less than the 'average stake', but it's false for all the whales who will earn more than under linear rewards. So 1. False
Under linear rewards, if everyone self-votes and we ignore witness rewards, STEEM's distribution becomes similar to a 100% PoS system like many others, which is arguably more fair (self-voting is only a break-even strategy, not a winning one).
I believe the way everyone thinks about this issue to be biased by steemit developers. The way STEEM has been coded makes the need for a 'reward curve'. What if we just changed the distribution algorithm in the first place instead of wanting to change the 'curve' that plugs into the existing algorithm?
reposted comment because first one downvoted by facists
I really would like to see some answers from the addressed people here ...
I am not a witness, and you know my point of view already to agree that a linear reward curve favors self-voting too much, indeed, but that I personally would prefer a curve which starts non-linear (against self-voting) and ends linear (against excessive rewards of single posts).
Anyway: good that you keep asking these important questions!
Amen!
what is it useful to us
@teamsteem (in his article above) and I (in my comment and here) wrote already what we think is useful ... But of course there are many different opinions.
I would like to read the point of views of top witnesses here, too!
It's still okay to post a lot and self-vote a lot under the proposed changed in economic incentives (not sure if OP agrees to all the items in the proposal). It'd just no longer the most efficient move for rewards most users. There'll be outliers of course, but I'll address that later.
Better not to mix up what's best for every individual and new user on the network with what's best for the platform, Steem. The latter should be as equally as important as the former. There's too much of a huge cost involved in linear atm, and it's not like linear has any shades like how we can define mild, medium, and extremely superlinear. Linear is just linear. It provides a different economical modality compared to superlinear.
Linear gives everyone efficiently priced votes, an immediately exploitable feature for anyone to undercut Steem's economy (attention, marketprice) anytime and without risk of overwhelming objections. It can be observed, experienced, and they even check out economically.
Linear creates a perpetually disarrayed attention economy and a discounted pool of Steem, which actually goes against the best long-term interest of stakeholders. We've also learned that n2 is too much so we should go for a softer measure. At least superlinear has different shades, unlike linear.
This is why some of us have proposed somewhere in between linear, n and n2. We just need most of the benefits of superlinear at low-cost, which is why some of us have chosen n1.3 as a ballpark figure. The other two proposal items like 50% curation rewards and a 10% separate downvote pool to plug most of the potential leaks and outliers, but I'll leave everyone to refer to @trafalgar's recent post on it for more info. It's a shame if we were only just supposed to flatten out n2 for its extreme effect, but instead of going to n1.x, we end up with linear (n1) simply because it's way easier to implement? There's a fundamental difference between linear and superlinear.
Thanks for the post @teamsteem, I wish more would look into the economical significance between linear vs superlinear, and why we should move away from what we have today. After the proposed changes, I know I would no longer heavily upvote my dog, cat, cousins, and friends who are generally not very good content creators, unless they improve and become more competitive over time. At least I know the proposed "new economy" isn't going to be actively discouraging stakeholders from rewarding great contributions.
Let's not get muddled up in our need to reward all of our activities on the network. Rewards and activities are separate. We can still post all day and night and vote ourselves, it's just not immediately the most efficient move for rewards anymore under the proposed changes. Instead, curation will be on the same level, if not better. Maybe I like to post a lot, it doesn't mean that I'd want to vote on my own stuff all the time if the economy doesn't encourage it (not as profitable to do so unless other curators really like my stuff). Curation is where it's at. That's what SP is all about.
I fully agree. I wish more people would have joined the discussion.
To reiterate for those that missed it (which appears to be almost everyone) -
As I stated in the comments under @Trafalgar's post, I have a solution to the bid bot issue that steps on no-one's toes and cannot really be circumvented. I wrote about it here. By giving every steem user the ability to mute the EFFECT of votes by allowing them to mute VOTERS - we allow everyone to block out the effects of bots while also empowering users to see more of what they want/need to see. This would also enhance the effectiveness of good curators too since their work would be more visible to those who care and they can then both benefit from their work by reading posts they discover and also then upvote them. This facilitates proof of brain in a pure way that does not involve overpowering anyone and that actually empowers people more than they have been. Empowerment is what is needed here.
I also commented that I see an issue with free downvoting in that the imbalance among user's Steem Power holdings means that malicious whales could literally shut down a large amount of the reward activity for the entire network, which would in turn boost their own earnings. Ultimately, power imbalance that can limit exposure is a problem when exposure is the proposed way to gain power and rectify the balance. This is a fundamental flaw in capitalism too, in the sense that new users (or new born babies) have to join in an old game where monopoly is already established. It's fine to say 'work hard and you can be big too', but in reality that's not how things play out due to the nature of the weighting involved and the ability of the biggest to crush the smallest with little incentive financially for them not to do so. The idea that the big whales who act selfishly to the point of destroying the network would change before they actually do destroy the network, presupposes a level of intelligence and perceptiveness/care on their part about such things - which is already possibly evidenced to be in short supply by the fact that they would have taken things to that point.
Every point in all of this is unique and we need to dive deeply into every point to fully understand it and reach the best outcome. Soundbytes jut can't cut it here. However, I will say that options that empower without overpowering anyone are always helpful.
This addresses this issue of visibility, and any UI can experiment with different visibility systems right now. It doesn't address the issue of reward distribution. The latter is a Steem blockchain function and can't be changed by UIs.
Yes, I appreciate that my suggestion is a UI feature, however, it does address reward distribution by directly empowering all users to affect reward distribution by disincentivising the use of bidbots in a way that everyone can decide to participate in or not participate in. If this approach gained wide adoption, it is easy to imagine that bidbots would no longer be attractive.
Bidbots do not primarily exist for visibility, that's a secondary consideration, and arguably could be described as an excuse. Even if they granted no visibility whatsoever they would still exist and be used because they would have a small positive ROI (as they occasionally do already). Granted this might reduce their perceived legitimacy (assuming they have some?) and that could be a positive, but this is all very indirect.
In the beginning it was profitable to use bid bots just to increase rewards, but now it is much harder to do that. If people want to sell their votes to each other, that's their business and I don't see that there's anything I or anyone else can do to stop that. The issue for me here is whether or not bid bots prevent true 'proof of brain' from functioning and it is clear to me that they do.
Without something approaching 'proof of brain' - which was an underpinning of the entire Steem network from the beginning, we are left with much less attraction to the eco-system and it's technology for many people.
The only reason I would ever use a bid bot is to increase the reach of my posts and I don't even bother to do that now since I rarely meet anyone who even looks at the trending posts page any more because of the bots. I remember that before the bots, it was quite possible to see some of the best posts on the network in the trending pages, as was intended. Now that just doesn't happen.
They prevent proof of brain from functioning because people sell their votes. When votes are made on the basis of generating a reward vs. expressing an opinion it is not possible for their to be proof of brain. Proof-of-brain = express an opinion.
My point there was that privately selling votes cannot be stopped, but we can take action to empower users to stop known accounts that specifically only sell votes from having any effect on our experience. I believe that the 'Steeve' UI for Steem does this already.
Bid bots make it practical to habitually buy votes, then use the profits to buy more votes - this means that those involved in this 'arms race' will always be faced with the thought that if they stop then they will lose their 'position'. They will have a way of dominating as long as they continue - the pattern is really quite similar to addiction except that it's everyone else who suffers more than the addicted person!
By implementing the voter muting feature it becomes possible for all of us to identify those accounts that violate our own limits in terms of their voting activity - whether it be because we think they sell votes or for other reasons. We can then be empowered to elect to remove them from our experience.
This ultimately might be called 'proof of the will and brain' :)
This is true however with downvotes it can be made unattractive to both buy (because return on the vote will be poor) or and sell (because selling prices will be poor) votes in a content-agnostic manner.
Your voter muting idea doesn't help the proof-of-brain function really. It might help make your personal view more useful. I don't disagree it is a fine feature, just not one that really helps address Steem's core problems.