RE: Steembay (a bot) under attack by a wannabe AI
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.
y = m*x + bThe rest of the world calls this a proportional/linear progression.
The more you add, the more it gets.
The more you take away, the less it gets.
If you were to draw the rewards as a function over time then it would not be a steady graph and there would be a zig zag and no line.
Rewards as a function of the sum of rshares, are a straight fucking line.
With the reward distribution formula being the way it is now, is there any reason to look for good content ?
Would anyone in their right mind would have designed a blockchain like this with 'posting rewards' but no incentive at all to reward a post that is not your own ?
I do not think so. This is why I say: It doesn't make sense.
But wait, SP/vote-power/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is abs(vote) and abs() is not a linear function when vote can be negative.
This is why voting with downvotes is not linear.
With downvotes we get all the benefits of superlinear voting (consensus) without the fatal flaw of plutocracy.
Absolutely yes, as long as people downvote inferior or overrewarded content. Your vote will have more influence (and earn more in curation rewards) if it isn't downvoted. If, by contrast, you vote for yourself and get downvoted, your vote may be worth little or nothing.
People don't downvote (enough). This is broken and needs to be fixed. (Also curation rewards are too low.)
None of this is anything new, I've been saying the same thing for two years. Even with n^2, better downvotes and higher curation would have been better at rewarding consensus rather than just concentration. Likewise with so-called linear.
Rewards as a function of the sum of rshares, are straight fucking linear.
That is, why I call it linear.
...
You forgot bid bot services. Nobody has to directly apply the vote themselves. They could even delegate to certain services, and get almost the same share of the posting rewards as if posting and voting their own non-content. There is no danger of downvotes with this method.
Because downvoting makes no sense with this linear rewards distribution function.
There is absolutely no economical benefit from it. Same for curation.
I keep saying that.
If rewards were not linear, looking for 'popular' content (much r_shares) would actually be rewarded.
Before 'equality' hardfork, my selfvote on some shitpost by myself was 0.01 $, but it was worth 0.50* $ on a popular post.
*yes, also downvotes.
It was interesting talking to you, but when I first found this place, I was much more impressed by you.
This is not rocket science, and you are acting like you do not understand the original intention behind the non-linear progression ?
It was so more steem power would not result in a directly proportionally higher share of posting rewards.
That's wrong. Indeed it has even been pointed out (correctly) that bid bots are more sensitive to downvotes, because they are motivated to maximize the return on their delegated vote power. Even a 20% reduction in reward means that a bid bot (or similar system) has a problem they need to address (by changing behavior such that their voting occurs with greater consensus) because their ROI is uncompetitive.
No, downvoting made no sense with the non-linear rewards distribution either. The fact that downvoting consumes valuable vote power remains the same regardless of the shape of the curve. (And very few, far too few, ever engaged in it with n^2, the same as currently.)
I do understand the intention, but upon further experience and analysis, it turned out not to work. 'Original intention' does not matter one bit when the intent was based on a false (if perhaps reasonable at the time) understanding of how things work.
As we learn more about how things work or do not work, we have to move on to other ideas, not stick with 'original intention' as if it is some kind of holy book. In reality, it was really just a rapidly-thrown-together system with some good ideas and some bad ones. It is not a badge of failure that the first prototype got a few things wrong.
Sure that was the intent. It was not only not the effect, but the actual effect was for steem power to earn more than proportionally greater rewards, both curation, and posting rewards (the latter via vote-buying, shill-posting, reward-sharing, etc.)
+
How things work out right now:
Small accounts, who can not retaliate, get downvotes for selfvoting or some other 'abuse'.
Bid bots strive.
The reality is, it is not better than before.
That is only your perception, because you do not have to do shit to maximize your profits. Congrats.