Introducing PSI: Payouts Sustainability Indicator (beta) for Steem
Is it possible for Steem attention economy to generate enough value to offset inflation required for author payouts? I think it is and here is why.
What is PSI?
Four key variables contribute to PSI:
- Total author payouts
- Share of 100% Steem Power post payouts
- SBDs burned for post promotion
- Average curation rewards share
PSI calculation is straightforward: 7 day moving average of sum of daily SBDs burned for post promotion divided by sum of daily liquid STEEM + SBD payouts and multiplied by 100%.
Liquid STEEM + SBD payouts value is total_payouts_value * (1 - avg_curator_rewards) / 2. Average curator reward share is currently at around 17-19%.
PSI
click chart to enlarge
Dates on the chart start from the 8th of December after post promotion was relaunched.
Daily 100% SP posts payouts share
7 day moving daily average of total SP only payouts share in percents.
Daily SBDs burn / total payouts
7 day moving daily average of SBDs burned divide by total payouts in percents.
What does it mean for Steem?
Steem already has a working minimum viable product that decreases inflationary pressure of author payouts. Increasing post promotion SBD burn by 10x or even 50x is not easy, but certainly possible. It would require community consensus with regard to the acceptance of promoted posts, changes to post ratings algorithms and more resources dedicated to the promoted posts functionality among other things.
PSI Limitations
- Doesn't consider power up and power down events. I am developing a metric to analyte power up/power down dynamics.
- May be not a "real" sustainability indicator if promoted posts are used only as a tool to increase payouts
- Not tested by time
- My data may contain errors and inaccuracies
Next steps
I'm hopeful that this posts sparks a community discussion about the present and future of promoted posts. Steem has an interesting ad tech product here and this looks like good news to me.
Could y'all help me understand a couple of things ..
Where does the money we currently spend to 'promote' a post, go? Does it come back to the promoter to any degree? Does it benefit the wider reward pool, or rather does it benefit the overall community to any substantial degree?
Theoretically, how would this percentile be affected if we were given the ability to add our own purchased STEEM direct to individual total post rewards (to any post)? (ie. tipping, but not treated separately from the total reward which would be shared with curators according to current ratios).
I am thinking that having this ability might be a great way to promote a post, perhaps to pay people to consume advertising, to provide direct funding to projects (with blockchain record) .. so on and so forth ..
Thanks
if we will have a possibility to promote posts in "substeems", then there will be bigger incentive to promote post to reach your direct audience.
I think that tags works alomost like "substeems" (like subreddits in Reddit.com). So all we need for that is a tags filter.
Yes and no. Because posts can have multiple tags it is easy to "spam" popular substeems, unlike reddit.
Creating viable content subviews or even more so viable subcommunities as is the case for many subreddits requires a bit more or different functionality.
Maybe we could delegate some of tagging work to curators? I mean they should have an option to upvote or downvote some tags in a post. And then these tags will be sorted (shown) in such order as they are preffered by voters(curators).
Putting a related promoted section under or to the side of each post could make promoting work better and thus more would use it
Great analitics!
Is it correct that in order to become sustainable Steem should have PSI>100% ?
Thanks!
I am not sure that PSI could ever be > 100%. PSI growth is a bullish signal that will drive Steem price up, increasing total payouts and decreasing PSI.
Interesting. Upvoted!
Very interesting. Are you also factoring in conversions from SBD to Steem?
These don't change the inflation cost at all.
I'm a fairly smart guy who has been trying for six months to understand this economic system. I keep failing. This post describes the importance of destroying SBD becuase that is debt in the system. Doesn't the amount of debt in any system contribute to its inflation in a practical sense? Conversions destroy SBD which lowers the overal debt but that doesn't impact inflation? Yeah, I'm still confused.
Has anyone written a steemit economics for dummies yet?
What OP is getting at in terms of 'attention economy' is people being willing to pay for promotion as an indicator that the attention of users is valuable. In the long run this form of payment could be a large inflow that more offsets the inflation expense of paying rewards and pulls value into the system, in exchange for the users' attention that the system is able to deliver (in turn by being fun, useful, and valuable to the users; though it is also possible in some models of an 'attention economy' that users are also paid directly).
The debt question is a different one, also important, but promotion could work just as well in terms of being part of an attention economy if it were STEEM being burned instead of SBD
@smooth, if I could get your perspective on this it would be a great help ..
I agree btw, STEEM not SBD, but what if it was made possible for STEEM to be put into the post's total rewards pool, directly, which would result in a more 'natural' form of promotion, given that it naturally increases the visibility of the post due to the reward itself and would naturally attract more interest. Then, the STEEM would be distributed to the curators with some coming back to the author, alternatively and better still, if someone decided to invest in the author's work/project by "tipping" it.
The author or investor would either be purchasing STEEM to do so, or it would come from their own balances, much of which would end up POWERED UP by either the author or the curators.
I must admit I do not understand the benefits or necessity of 'burning' either of the currencies, but this would certainly put some STEEM 'into play' as it were. Perhaps I am just demonstrating my ignorance here, but it seems it would have multiple benefits and potential uses.
Much appreciated sir!
That is somewhat like tipping, which has been discussed quite a bit. I think someday we will probably see some form of tipping on the platform, but I have no idea when nor what form it will take (and I could be wrong)
estoy de acuerdo con lo que dices