RE: Steembay (a bot) under attack by a wannabe AI
Everything the Steem allows is legal.
Conversely, this means that self-votes and flag campaigns must also be accepted.Voting in applause is a voluntary act. In contrast, voting as an instrument for generating income appears to be a desperate, strategic act.
To vote for oneself sometimes seems like loving oneself. It could be like narcissism and it is considered socially intolerable. This leads to these insane excesses, such as self-proclaimed policemen who proclaim their view of Steemit as a general rule and punish violations with sanctions.
These pathological downvote excesses have had an unfortunate tradition since the so-called "experiment" of some self-important, arrogant whales as in early 2017. As long as the flag exists, it will probably also be used by these dubious characters. We have to take the farts of these self-important people, like the weather.
But in the case of Steembay, one can consider whether it is actually a sustainable concept to base its financing on its own votes. That seems a little desperate to me. At this point there could be a whole range of much more effective measures, if the operators would just try their imagination a little more virtuously.
Translated from German with DeepL
The thought process behind the development of steembay was far away from desperate. We did not want to take a fee for auctioning, but make it free to use. The selfvoting serves two points: financing it ofc, while we never voted with the steembay stack for our own accounts but more important to influence the overview of the bidding process.
We are online now since Nov. 17 and NOT ONCE anybody complained about us "selfvoting". We had completely different plans (as already explained we wanted to upvote every auction), but the support we got was minimal also the SBD spike harmed our initial plans a lot.
Once more from a game theory perspective: I would invite a million businesses trying to provide services while storing in their account 1000 $ instead of trying to make it "feel" more "fair" for those who never invested a dime.
Selfvoting does not really harm the blockchain, but it slows down a lot healthy growth. "Policing it" or as personz is putting it "making a statement" can be a short term approach. But people will always find a way to act the most opportunistic possible. Thus any way they try to "teach manners" will lead into people finding ways around it followed by even stricter arbitrary lines or more complex algorithms. In the end there is a lot of power and influence centered around a small group able to change rules at a whim. I oppose this approach as I did with gilds and voting trails, as I do with bidbots and vote selling.
Don't get me wrong... I LOVE flags, even if I don't use them often.
Organizing votes OR flags is simply another way of giving away responsibility. We loose and miss a huge opportunity that could have been realised by blockchain technology. But probably that is just me fooling around with my thoughts and utopias of a new society.
This blockchain had an integrated mechanism to reward consensus. ( non linear posting reward algorithm )
Selfvoting has always been 'legal' but was no issue before the equality hardfork.
It absolutely was an issue, but only for whales (or people who would team up and effectively create a 'synthetic whale'). Indeed in those cases, it was an even bigger issue because such large voters were amplified by the effect of n^2.
@smooth, as you are here discussing about the topic, I really would like to know your opinion about a reward curve which starts non-linear but ends linear?
I had written about it here.
Later I saw that @clayop had made a similar approach to reach the same aim.
This is my main idea, however, I think also implementing diminishing returns when upvoting the same accounts (including own ones) again and again and reintroducing the restriction to four (or less) full paid posts per day (from some hard forks ago) could be interesting?
I think that's a pretty good idea. Another way to describe that is a penalty, tax, or some similar terms, on the low end which discourages milking of rewards via high volume spam. I've written in support of essentially the same idea and Steemit even proposed it once. Apparently there are some technical obstacles to implementing at least some versions of it though.
I don't support that because it encourages creating large stables of round robin accounts to evade the repeat voting rule and/or the four post rule. That doesn't help anything and in fact adds more costs onto the system. The four post rule (and maybe the repeat voting rule) also disadvantages many plausible blockchain usages that are different from long-form blogging. Finally, comments are rewarded just as posts are. Applied to comments, four is much too low, so your rule would either encourage reward milkers to use more comments or would discourage comments. Neither is desirable.
See my comments above. As much as we would like people to behave in the desired manner, we can't wish that into existence. All system rules must consider and be evaluated in light of the full range of possible human behavior including evasion or 'misuse'.
Thanks for your input/opinions, I really appreciate it.
I would say the issue was (is) the ridiculous imbalance in distribution of shares and that those shareholders act like they won their stake in the lottery.
You made a lot of sense back in the day, but now you are just picking on my wording.
So were large downvoters. You all had a chance to 'pull the other crabs down'.
I think it was too few people and you guys just ganged up / could not be bothered.
Glad you are still lurking, tho.
Same as now, and now, as before, we see that downvoting as currently envisioned is a mostly failed model because there are is too much to lose (pissing people off, arguments, wasted voting power, retaliation/flag wars) and too little (in fact effectively nothing) to gain.
The crab bucket is a nice analogy but also by now, nicely disproven in practice.
BTW, when you start talking about what people 'act like' as being the real problem, you are always going to be on the wrong track. People are people and will always behave in a variety of ways, not the way you think they should. If a system doesn't have mechanisms to function properly in the presence of the full range of human behaviors, particularly a system explicitly intended for humans to use, then such a system is broken.
I am proposing non linear posting rewards, because it is a mechanism, that rewards consensus.
Such a curation process also creates a valuable peer review mechanism yadda yadda yadda.
I am saying that the chosen handful of people, who got the initial stakes, had no integrity and are not a big enough group to call this a conclusive experiment.
Just because you 10 people did not get your shit together does not mean the idea was wrong.
It is not called 'ned and his 5 crab buddies and 2 bad guys in a bucket' -analogy.
Anyways, linear rewards make no sense at all.
There are still some idiots like me, who vote for posts, but sooner or later, nobody will use the vote function anymore. The system right now does not reward curation, at all.
It would be more efficient to offer a service, that gives you a direct cashback on your vote.
Perhaps I will set that up, just to take the piss.
I'll be an entrepeneur like bernie or ned !
Except that it doesn't actually do that (except in a fantasy world of wishful thinking). It encourages 'consensus' (in a perverse manner of speaking) not between people but between individual units of SP. The most efficient way to achieve that consensus is for one person to own a lot of SP, or for a small number of large SP holders to work together to vote the same posts and then split the rewards.
The number of non-downvoters is a lot larger than that. In fact it is almost anyone (and for the record I'm one of the biggest downvoters in the history of Steem, but still, that doesn't make my point about the lack of downvoting generally wrong.)
Besides, even if what you wrote is correct, it does show that the idea is wrong. Because as, I noted above, for something to work on a blockchain, it has to work for the full range of human behaviors, including a bunch of people (regardless of number) not behaving as you would like.
You're right. It is a good thing we don't have linear rewards, because we have downvoting. If A upvotes and B downvotes, the resulting reward is (assuming equal vote power, etc.) proportionate to SP_A - SP_B, which is not linear in SP. It is precisely a consensus rewarding mechanism as you described above.
Unfortunately, people don't downvote (for a number of reasons including this already stated above), which is the crux of the problem. Fix that and Steem's concept of voting on rewards might have a chance (though blockchain voting has many other problems still). Otherwise, it probably doesn't.
That said, this entire thread (sadkitten vs. steembay, an exception to the general rule of hardly any downvotes) illustrates my point nicely. Self-voting, particularly when practiced in a certain, highly focused, manner, is an example of voting outside of consensus in the sense that there are stakeholders (sadkitten supporters) who don't support it. Therefore steembay's manner of voting its stake is out of consensus and is rewarded proportionately less. Since the reward pool is zero sum relative to voting, that means that everyone else's (in-consensus) votes are rewarded more.
See ? you are picking on my wording. Proportional progression ?
Unfortunately, I did not have my math education in English language. That is why I am not as precise in my statements, as I usually am.
Above, I have told you the reason, why this experiment failed.
All the people who went to steemfest, all the people who went to any steem meetup, all the peope, who I ever talked to, together they own a fraction of the stakes in steem of one of the shadow accounts.
These accounts are not even trying to act like they would, if they had paid for their coins.
I'm not picking on your wording. I am disagreeing with the concept that we have linear rewards. We don't because we (sort of) have downvotes. Linear weighting of reward without downvotes would be true linear and would have broken game theory. As long as people are willing to downbote non-value-adding activity then the return on voting is not linear and the alleged problem of self-voting to generate 'interest' does not exist.
A solution would have been to spread votes as wide and small as possible (pharesims approach was ONE possible way of doing it). Still remains the problem of a VERY thin reference group. I think to call n² "failed" is simply not true. Even now with a mio registered accounts it seems there are not much more than 50k real people behind it. A linear voting will never have an effect of "consensus" and flags ... as much I like those... will probably never have the needed effect as they will always be seen and used as punishment => praxeology
I told Ned, when linear rewards started at the same time the whale-not-voting-project ended that there are no reliable and robust results to work with. When he then just smiled at me, telling me with a smirk that "We will know"... I, for the first time questioned the reasoning behind some decisions.
Well... I still have hope.
That's not 'a solution' it is a statement of a goal. What mechanism do you propose to accomplish that, considering the full range of possible human behavior?
Better late than never
Considering the "full range" is not that difficult. Most people will just act opportunistic, possibly inhibited more or less by their morals or an understanding of the mechanics of creating value.
In the early days I wrote a lot about my ideas/thoughts but unfortunately I was so "unimportant" that my considerations have been left unheard or ignored. I think a lot of much better people than myself have left the ship for that same reason.
I am not a fan of statements like "if only everybody had done xyz", so I just will be silent about that.
In the meantime I am not sure that STINC even knows where they are heading to. All I hear is "buzzwords" like SMTs, communities, hivemind, GUI.
I think it was paulag who made an interesting approach for an accurate estimation of "real" users. 50k if I remember well. This opposed to perhaps 100 whales of which at least half have no clue about long term market mechanics is not delivering any reliable numbers.
An image that I see quite often in my head thinking about STEEM is:
Children playing with a (very expensive) petri dish.
The main problem (even before voting) is how to manage mass adoption and account creation fees. Until that is managed, every other discussion is futile and also every thought about "failing reward curves" will have no reliable numbers and thus remain tea cup readings. ( I think and hope this is what the giant stack is for, but as there is near no communication about it, I can totally be wrong).
Well said (even through translation)