You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Make Steemit Great Again: Fork This Place!
The vote power decay is a very important and tricky tradeoff between mass voting (with slower/flatter decay and people feeling like it is a big deal every time they place a vote (due to rapidly declining vote power) and therefore need to be extremely careful with every single vote. I think the current tradeoff isn't terrible (it was reached after trying a faster decay and finding it problematic). It could perhaps be adjusted to be a little faster but shifting it too much risks turning voting from an enjoyable expression of opinion into a scarcity calculation, or even a perceived source of "punishment" for casual users.
Sorry, I didn't communicate that well. All I meant was "The decay should increase beyond a certain threshold". We can follow the same curve as it is up to a certain threshold. Let's say, 100-200 full strength votes - some amount which is clearly beyond regular curation behaviour. Beyond which, you only have vote spammers - whether bots or human - the voting power can decay fast. I'm sure you have seen there are bots which make 500-600 votes every day; this will penalize them without affecting the regular curators. In fact, they will have more R-shares allocated back to them, recovered from mass voters.
This is what I mean, if you excuse a layman's drawing -
Currently high frequency bots are all voting with arbitrary percentage of weights. Even if they can't vote with a percentage, actually it's not hard to get around a fixed limit: just split SP among several accounts and vote one by one (round-robin), or always vote with the account which has highest VP (best-first); when it's needed, vote with many or all accounts at same time.
Good point. Superlinear penalty probably would not work.
It's not about the number of votes, but voting power. So it doesn't matter if it's 100 votes at 100% or however many at 10%; after a certain threshold, the voting power would decay faster to penalize for vote spamming. When I said "100-200 full-strength votes" I really meant "100-200 full-strength votes or equivalent at other strengths". This may not reduce the number of votes - true - but it'll reduce influence/Rshares from high frequency bots.
Of course, you're right that they can just split SP among several accounts, but they are already doing that. This will just make it harder to do so. Today there might be people spamming with 500 votes at X% with 10 accounts taking their VP down to 20%; now they'll need to make 100 accounts. It'll be a deterrent.
High frequency bots don't have high influence/rshares. It's a trade off. You either have high frequency (voting on more posts), or high influence/rshares on less posts, but not both. There is only 20% VP regenerated everyday.
Since everyone can create accounts for free (registration fee is deposited into new account), number of accounts is not actually a barrier for bot runners -- they're already scripting everything. Sure it will need some work/efforts, but it won't stop them.
//Edit: forgot this: in current code, there is a penalty when calculating VP regeneration. The penalty is larger for voters with higher frequency.
[Comment tree limit]
Today you can choose between high frequency and high influence. There's little penalty for high frequency votes, or more accurately, extreme drainage of voting power. That's all I'm trying to say! By penalizing unreasonably high voting power drainage more, we can weed out the bots and vote spammers. It'll also encourage bots to improve their algorithms and vote wisely.
(Personally, I don't have any problem with bots, but it's a major issue for the community)
Imagine you decided to just say "fuck it" and started downvoting everything that came down the line. Or upvoting your own comments. Not like 40 like 200 or 400 or something in a day.
Yeah, you would pay on subsequent days down the line because it would take you 5 days regain your full power and start over. But on that one day where youre voting like a madman, you would have far more influence than you normally do.
someone like blacklist, for example, or asshole, who is only here to be a nuscience, can concentrate their nuscience-ness all into one day, by mortgaging their voting power on later days.
Im not sure im entirely convinced that any more penalty than the normal degradation of your power is necessary, but i think thats what liberosist is getting at.
Your reply is a bit confusing for me.
I understand that you want the system to be better, so do I. So we're discussing the "how".
My point is, high frequency bots already gave up influence. You want to punish them more by setting a limit on frequency? Then they'll split to several accounts then vote less frequently with each account (each achieve a "normal" frequency), but in total the frequency is same as before. So your "solution" will result in neither more nor less vote spamming, aka useless. I'm sure bots are always improving their algorithms, that strategy I just mentioned is a possible result of improvements. You keep saying that bots should vote less but vote wisely, but I'm afraid that the best algorithm they've got (after improvements) is to vote more. So, if we want to address the bot voting issue, we need to look for other solutions.
On the other hand, if we want to address the influence issue, better focus on the whales, the curve.
Yeah, you are probably right that some sort of increasing curve would work. I just want to avoid regular users experiencing severe or even easily perceptible penalties with normal use especially if voting on comments becomes more popular, or the UI is changed to encourage more voting (for example, by removing the visible delay). I offered the thought exercise once (when reducing the daily vote target was proposed) to consider how people would vote if the vote target were changed to 1000. I believe people would vote even more freely than now, and more comments would get votes. That would probably be a good thing, not a bad thing (ignoring unintended consequences).