RE: Witch Hunting Self Upvoters Solves Nothing
That this idea was an original objective of Steemit?
From the whitepaper, section 2.5.2 - Voting on Distribution of Currency, pg 17 on new whitepaper available here:
The naive voting process creates a Prisoner’s Dilemma whereby each individual voter has incentive to vote for themselves at the expense of the larger community goal. 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. On the other hand, if only one voter defects then that voter would win undeserved profits while having minimal effect on the overall value of the currency.
In order to realign incentives and discourage individuals from simply voting for themselves, money must be distributed in a nonlinear manner. For example a quadratic function in votes, i.e., someone with twice the votes of someone else should receive four times the payout and someone with three times the votes should receive nine times the payout. In other words, the reward is proportional to votes^2 rather than votes. This mirrors the value of network effect which grows with n^2 the number of participants, according to Metcalfe’s Law[5].
This is exactly what was weakened in HF 19, the incentive to not defect to self vote, and exactly what needs to be fixed.
I agree.
I'm talking about today's reality. I joined Steemit after this HF, so I don't know it was before. What I know is the reality of today.
Thanks for sharing your opinion :)
Oh I see. Today's reality is not described in any official document except the code (not easy to read) but we can all observe by experimentation, though it's not ideal.
Markets are good at optimising around incentives and we can observe from the increase in self voting that it is more incentivized after HF 19, as can anyone who has experimented from this.
No problem, thanks for asking. 🙂
I think you neglect the reduction in votes as an incentive to self vote. HF 19 reduced the number of votes that can be cast by minnows by 400%. During the time HF19 was being discussed and developed, the number of posts rose by 1000%.
The number of votes available to be cast has been reduced dramatically, and those new to the platform are starved for votes.
I don't think the exponential weighting extant prior to HF19 reduced reward pool mining at all. Virtually all author rewards went to a handful of accounts, and as far as I know that hasn't changed at all since HF19.