RE: Make Steemit Great Again: Fork This Place!
I agree with a lot of what you've written here, and I wish I had more SP so my vote would have more impact on whether or not these things are actually heard by Steemit, Inc. I have a few specific comments about your proposal:
2 – Treat blog posts and comments the same.
Definitely makes the most sense to me. I don't understand anything about this separate reward pool for comments and blog posts. The more I think about it, the more asinine it seems to me.
3 – Increase curation rewards back to a 50/50 split with post rewards.
4 – Adjust the reverse auction to a much shorter time frame.
5 – Send the auctioned curation rewards back into the curation pool.
I slightly agree with 3, slightly disagree with 4, and wholeheartedly agree with 5. I really like 5. I'm answering them together because I believe they are all part of the same issue.
My perfect vision of curation rewards is something like this: Curation rewards should reward the smartest voters. If you stumble across an article by a brand-new author that's been sitting around for a while and it's spectacular but it hasn't received any upvotes, you as the first voter deserve a big chunk of its potential rewards. The curation rewards should absolutely be highest for the very first voter. Once it's gotten some traction, we can let the curation rewards level off some. But we should be willing to spend a pretty penny to pay the person who found it; we should reward the smartness of that voter.
On the other hand, if @krnl posts a new article, everybody knows it's going to join 6 others of his on the front page within minutes. Why do we pay curation rewards for his articles at all? I don't have to be smart to know that it's going to trend. My bot knows it will; @krnl's score in my bot's model is 242101. That's super high (mine, for comparison, is -2686). We don't need to waste the network's money to pay curation rewards for such articles.
Few people seem to understand this, but that's what the reverse auction is all about: not wasting money on paying curation for obvious winners.
To your 3 and 4: 3 (the fixed fraction) needs to be more flexible, and that's part of what the reverse auction does. I don't particularly think we're ready for 5 minutes, but 10 would probably be ok. From a bot's perspective, 10 minutes is an eternity. Ultimately I think we need a more dynamic way to allocate rewards (a smart algorithm that sends rewards where they're needed), and that's part of what your 5 would accomplish. If the reverse auction adequately removes rewards from obvious winners, then putting those back into the general curation pool would likely dramatically increase the amount of curation that's paid overall. It certainly would be a massive redistribution from authors to curators, and the management doesn't seem to like that direction right now.
And of course I'll include the disclaimer that I am talking in self-interest right now. If curation rewards doubled or tripled, I'd be able to make really decent money on the curation game. That increase would actually probably suffice to incentivize me to buy more steem and power it up. And isn't that what we all want?
5 is a great idea, but im pretty sure i ts not workable. Unless you just send it back to the entire curation pool, not just the pool for that post.
Because earlier voters have such a large edge over later voters, the RA proceeds that you split among the post-auction voters will be dominated not by the smartest voters, but by the voters that vote immediately after the 30 minute mark. So someone like wang could have Wang and Wang30. Wang votes 2 minutes in like he does now (and does OK) but then he also uses wang30 to vote precisely at the 30 minute mark, so wang 30 gets the lions share of the 20X bigger Reverse auction payment that wang generated with his vote.
Youre also creating a huge guaranteed rewards at the 30 minute mark for any post that has a decent amount of support, because there are so much RA funds up for grabs and the first people in will dominate their distribution.
Yes, that's the idea. To send it back to the curation pool in general.
The idea isn't to reward the first voter at the end of the auction. The rewards need to be spread further back on the vote list. The problem right now is
You can have voters 1-10 taking 25% or 50% of the curation rewards and voters 30 or 40 getting 0%, even with a decent amount of stake. Then, voter 80 or 100 can come in and take another 5 or 10%, if they have a much larger stake. The aim would be to make sure that voter 30 and 40 aren't always getting 0. Their vote is really no different in terms of discovery or ranking, and even though they beat half of the rest of the voters to the punch, they can come away with nothing at all while very late voters with a larger stake can still grab a piece of the pie.
I get the advantages of having a larger stake. But even with mine being 27,000+ SP, if I don't vote at the "right" time, my rewards can vary pretty significantly. It can be a matter of earning less than 0.1 SP or earning 5+ SP. And the time really doesn't even have much to do with it. It mostly has to do with which user voted before me, even if that other user's vote is only one block earlier (3 seconds or less).
See my reply to BP below. If you just send it back to the pool, it will end up distributed the same way as the pool currently is. If youre sacrificing 50% to the reverse auction now, and you send it allback to the pool, all youll do is just double everyone's curation rewards.
A big part of the problem is that even though the reverse auction effects the payout for early voters, it doesn't change their weight, so they still dominate the curation rewards distribution, they just give up most of the funds their domination entitles them to.
The real solution to this is to attenuate their effective voting stake in the auction, not their reward. That is to say, if you vote at the 90% RA mark (3.3 minutes in), then for the distribution of curaiton rewards, your vote should count likeyou had 10% of your SP. So a 100K SP voter in the third minute shouldbe treated for distribution purposes like a 10Ksp voter.
Yeah, I like that idea. Maybe this should be explored more. I'm sure we'll chat about it.
I maintain that's a design feature, not a problem. The purpose of the reverse auction is to reduce curation rewards for easy votes. Period. It must make obvious strategies self-defeating.
Because people who want to upvote themselves are going to do it regardless. It's not like there is another solution for them to cheat the system. The fact that we hardly see anyone upvoting themselves means its a non issue.
Why do you need a curve at all? Isn't voting power based on how much power someone has? There is no need for a curve which is why I suggested we remove it.
Whales could already upvote themselves now and make a significant amount of money why are none doing it?
Downvoting is not a hack, it is already built in. You just have to use the feature.
The algorithms happens to penalize almost every single posts on the platform, surely it can't be the best solution right..
30 or whatever still might get nothing, depending on how much SP he has, but he'll always do better for the whale coming in than he would have done otherwise.
That is to say, voter 30 never loses out when a whale comes in after him. (though if his stake is small enough, it might not be enough to actually get him a payout. but it will get him closer i think always). If he's not making money on a post with a faily high payout, its because he is dominated by the medium sized guys in postition 1-29.
Oh absolutely. I neglected to clarify that in my comment. The whole point of it is to send it to other posts. The reverse auction is there so we don't waste curation dollars on on obvious winners, so it wouldn't make any sense at all to shovel the money right back on top of the voters for that post.
Makes sense. I noticed when i was looking at curation rewards before that many of the "obvious winners" only get 5-7% in rewards.
The problem with giving it to curators on other posts is which other posts? If you split it up equally according to post payout, then it will mostly just go back to the biggest posts where its lost. If you only give it to posts with little money lost to the reverse auctions (that is to say, don't give it to the sure winners), then youll give a guaranteed payday to anyone voting on a non-voted (or low voted) post after 30 minutes.
That is to say, if a non-voted post has no votes after 30 minutes, its already a guaranteed 25% of however much your vote is worth by itself (which is a potential vector of abuse for whales anyway). But if its not just 25% of what your vote is worth by itself, but some share of a pretty significant RA redistribution pool, then there's even more.
Also, there is nothing stopping wang 30 (or any other bot) from just voting on everything with no rewards precisely at 30 minutes.
Essentially every new post would be eligible, subject to its own reverse auction. Same as now, only more curation rewards.
Well, roughly speaking, your last point is exactly the magic of it. It's designed to make good strategies self-defeating. If any of this ever creates a guaranteed payday, then people will start competing for that payday in the reverse auction and the payday will vanish. Just like the reverse auction currently takes away curation rewards from sure winners.
You're right, the exact details would have to be thought out well to make sure the redistribution works correctly. But notice that even the "vote every un-voted post after 30 minutes" strategy is essentially self-defeating, because if everybody did that on every post, their votes would all cancel out.
I haven't completely thhought it through like that, but my feeling is that it would create a giant snowball of reverse auction funds that get re re re re reversed but never awarded.
EDIT -- no it wouldn't, but it wouldn't change anything at all either. You would eventually get to the point where the curation rewards were increased in magnitude to the full 25%, but were distributed in exactly the same proportions as now.
So if we lost 50% of curation rewards now, it would just double all current awards.... which isnt necessarily bad.
Nesting limit.
Heh, that would be interesting. Maybe you'd need a relief valve to prevent overflows. Or, to increase the complexity even more (because KISS matters so much to these people), set it up dynamically so that the fuller the curation pool, the lower the curation/author split gets, essentially to push the unused curation rewards back into the author pool.
nah its not necessary, it would eventually reach equilibrium.
so like if you started at 10000, and lost 5K to the reverse auction, the numbers would look like
10000 -5k carried over
15000 - 7.5k carried over
17500 -- 8750 carried over
18750 -- 9375 carried over
19375 -- 19687 carried over.
it would approach 20K but i think never quite get there.
KISS is a dumb idea. Some problems just don't lend themselves to simple solutions.