Its all about the Benjamins -- Or is it?
This post started as a response to this comment by @timcliff.
There were sprawl issues, so i decided to make a whole new post. I intend to analyze a post, and see if voting really is all about the benjamins.
Im using this post by steem sports. You can take a look at the Steemdb report here
I selected steem sports because i suspect many people think it is a large beneficiary of bot voting (it is) and users looking for curation rewards (it isnt). Other popular posts i looked at had a similar distribution to SS. Ill do another one in the replies if people think its not representative.
On this post, there were 18 voters with 1 tera-rshares and above. All 18 got top 30 weights for curation rewards. In addition to these 18 voters, there were 12 additional voters who had less than 1 tera-rshare but also got in the top 30 cuation reward weights.
All told, these 30 voters were responsible for approximately 92% of the posts total $161.25 payout (taking steemsports upvote as a given). So good, bad or indifferent, if we want to know whether curation rewards are whats motivating these voters, we should take a look at how much they made.
CUration rewards are 25% of the posts rewards. They're assigned according to the SP of the voter, and how much SP votes before and after him. The chart below lists the top 30 voters, the rshares they gave to the post, and their curation reward weight and curation rewards on the post.
In total, this post earned $40.31 in curation rewards. Of that $40.31, $35.17 was forfieted in the reverse auction and went to the poster. Of the remaining $5.17, $.69 was lost due to rounding down rewards less than 2 cents.
Of the $4.48 actually distributed in curation rewards(2.7% of the posts value btw. This is low, but not crazy low. @furion 's last two posts had 6% and 7% respectively go to curators. The-alien's last post was 5.5%. @jrcornel 's 'i lost 60k' post was 6% to curators. @ats-david 's pga post was 6.25% to curators), @smooth, the post's largest individual supporter, earned 1.6 SP, worth approximately 25 cents at the time. berniesanders, the post's second largest supporter, earned 8.2SP, worth about $1.20. WItness.svk earned about 40SP, worth 60 cents.
| Voter | curation weight | vote weight |
|---|---|---|
| smooth | 127.659 PV | 28.838 TRS |
| berniesanders | 652.678 PV | 22.925 TRS |
| xeldal | 106.549 PV | 8.753 TRS |
| complexring | 47.585 PV | 7.937 TRS |
| riverhead | 73.376 PV | 7.485 TRS |
| witness.svk | 316.896 PV | 5.972 TRS |
| enki | 81.234 PV | 5.301 TRS |
| datasecuritynode | 41.686 PV | 5.025 TRS |
| nextgencrypto | 54.825 PV | 4.399 TRS |
| silversteem | 34.909 PV | 3.439 TRS |
| thisvsthis | 51.594 PV | 1.760 TRS |
| james212 | 14.541 PV | 1.486 TRS |
| silver | 25.050 PV | 1.474 TRS |
| cryptoctopus | 63.214 PV | 1.293 TRS |
| cyber | 10.649 PV | 1.154 TRS |
| steemrollin | 58.548 PV | 1.126 TRS |
| ihashfury | 7.164 PV | 1.093 TRS |
| tuck-fheman | 7.668 PV | 1.045 TRS |
| silver | 25.050 PV | 1.474 TRS |
| wang | 71.090 PV | g92.163 GRS |
| svk | 20.502 PV | 202.593 GRS |
| joseph | 20.324 PV | 773.011 GRS |
| joele | 19.602 PV | 182.438 GRs |
| ioc | 19.491 PV | 599.755 GRS |
| goldmatters | 14.961 PV | 114.900 GRS |
| leesunmoo | 14.268 PV | 415.900 GRS |
| mata | 12.143 PV | 90.027 GRs |
| arama | 11.320 PV | 661.884 GRS |
| saramiller | 7.728 PV | 140.875 GRS |
| teamsteem | 34.736 PV | 314.771 GRs |
Now, that doesn't seem like a great ROI, but 40 times a day, it might be an OK return. So maybe they really are in it for the money. Except. Nearly every single one of these voters could have earned more in curation rewards by simply picking a random post or comment that was more than 30 minutes old and had not been voted on, and upvoting it at full power (the possible exceptions [email protected], who did pretty good for curation based on stake, though i think it would have been close-ish and wang)
I don't mean their own comment, i mean just some random comment... Since it would be easy to find a comment or post without any votes and more than 30 minutes old, its accurate to say the individuals who determined 92% of this posts payout were sacrificing some curation rewards by voting on it. Potentially a lot. I think at the time both bernie sanders and smooth had upvotes worth in the 10-20 dollar range, which would mean a guaranteed payout of $2.5 - $5 for voting on an empty post (10-20X the return on the vote for smooth and 2x-4x for bernie).
Now, this is not always the case. There are high paying posts where curators do better than what i described here. However, if you look at the posts where curators do better, theyre generally the kind of posts that @timcliff and @snowflake seem to want (ie, not posts that are auto-upvoted because of bots. Ones where the first whale comes in hours after its posted). An example is @snowflakes own "guradians" post (part ii) (with over 18% of the reward going to curators, it was one of the highest 'top trending' posts I saw).
When a curator does do well on a high paying post, it is almost always the first whale in that does well. It becomes a worse and worse deal for subsequent whales after that (thats why berniesanders did so much better than smooth on the post above, despite giving up 66% to the reverse auction).
I am in 100% agreement with @timcliff and @snowflake that many (whales and non whales alike) are voting the way they do for the wrong reasons. However, those reasons are not curation rewards. They just aren't.
It's funny that you brought this up because I just made a similar comment earlier to another user regarding a misconception about something I had mentioned on my post. It was a question of "piling on."
https://steemit.com/steemit/@mark-waser/fixing-curation-rewards-or-how-much-is-a-poor-person-worth#@ats-david/re-mark-waser-fixing-curation-rewards-or-how-much-is-a-poor-person-worth-20170216t175425171z
I agree that the reason isn't necessarily related to curation rewards. In fact, I have stated many times that whales actually earn a generally lower percentage on their curation returns than most active curators. Too many people look at the total SP distributed via curation rather than the percentage of their stake that is earned.
For example: When I spend more time curating, I can typically earn anywhere between 0.05% and 0.1% in SP returns on any given day. Most of the whales are earning closer to 0.01%.
Of course, there are some exceptions. If you look at val-b, for instance, over the past month, he is earning percentages between 0.04% and 0.07% regularly. And the actual SP amounts are fairly large (over 1,000 per day, many times), which is why making these accounts more active in guilds isn't necessarily the best idea. They crowd out all other curators and further increase the disparity of stake while also lessening the influence of smaller stakeholders.
https://steemdb.com/@val-b/curation
Im not sure if its an arrangement or he just got lucky, but val-b does well on curation, at least partially, because when he and berniesanders vote for curie posts, he always gets to go first (and also seems to go before most of the SP weight of the whole trail)
But yeah i agree with the rest.
Edit to add -- he mentioned in another thread that all the curation rewards he earns that way go back to curie.
Upvoted and resteemed for good discussion topic, and great data on the issue.
It is a really great point, and you are right that there are lots of other causes for misaligned voting.
I am curious though, if you look at the data objectively - is there a case for curation rewards causing some bad influence? If so, I would be curious to know what percentage of overall rewards it is influencing.
Certainly. For one thing, many people don't understand the system. So they pile onto trending posts or autovote popular authors believing that they will earn curation rewards that way, when, in fact, it won't. Also, many would argue that wang/recursive's strategy is pretty good for maximizing rewards (beating everyone in and voting in the first 2 minutes and just taking the hit for the reverse auction) and i think that's negative at least to an extent. But i also think that part of things would be trivially easy to solve (just distribute reverse auction money to later voters).
But they also do some good. Because if you look at the people who are really after curation rewards (biophil and ats-david are examples) theyre actually finding and upvoting decent undiscovered content by overlooked authors. And yeah, theyre doing it for the money (i assume). But ive been a business person for most of my life. I can't hate that they are doing it for the money.
that is to say, the people who are really voting the way they do for curation rewards aren't the ones you think and theyre not voting for the posts you think they are.... the posts you think are the beneficiaries of curation reward driven voting offer some of the worst returns possible for that endeavor.
I can tell you definitively that my bot votes for steemsports, and I vote for them manually whenever I see them too, because steemsports is step 1 towards a full steem predictions market (I actually am not a big sports fan). My intent in voting for them is to give whatever little support I can to an innovative entrepreneurial platform, who I hope will raise demand for the steem cryptocurrency.
IMO, thats why most of its major and medium sized supporters vote for SS. Probably the minnows are in it for the free monies, but theyre not having a significant impact on payout anyway
I think you're right.
Given there are bots running around upvoting every post 1%, are there any posts that don't have upvotes at 30 minutes?
comments... that said, fyrst isnt doing bad on curation rewards for stake if you look at his numbers.
rEsteemed and UPvoted because I loved the name ; )
just saw this article. great analysis! :)
Me too.
I haven't kept up with the entire debate, but I really have no idea what "misaligned voting" could possibly be.
well just staying o the feed page or the new or hot or whatever trail there is and voting on payouts or people, rather than content, essentially gaming the system.
Easy solution would be, get rid of the Upvote button on the pages :D and leave it in where the post is at.
Sad part is that would only annoy some people and add in more bots :D since they won't have a problem upvoting wherever the button is, I'm arguing we need more readers because that is what the platform is for, creation and curating, now if people don't want to do it but want the rewards there is a misalignment.
I guess that many users are still voting for what they like and authors they support without paying much attention to the curation rewards.
Yes and there are many gaming the votes, the problem is the ones that do far outweigh in power the ones who support good content, so good content gets 300 votes and 200 views and a 5$ payout and some posts make 200 votes and 10 views with a 20-30 post payout. So how is that balanced and how is that curating content :D
This post has been ranked within the top 50 most undervalued posts in the second half of Feb 16. We estimate that this post is undervalued by $7.65 as compared to a scenario in which every voter had an equal say.
See the full rankings and details in The Daily Tribune: Feb 16 - Part II. You can also read about some of our methodology, data analysis and technical details in our initial post.
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