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RE: Steembay (a bot) under attack by a wannabe AI

in #flags6 years ago

You're right. It is a good thing we don't have linear rewards ...

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.

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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 + b

The 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.

The 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.

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.

With the reward distribution formula being the way it is now, is there any reason to look for good content ?

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.
...

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.

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.

People don't downvote (enough). This is broken and needs to be fixed. (Also curation rewards are too low.)

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.

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.

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.

Because downvoting makes no sense with this linear rewards distribution function

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.)

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

  1. Curation rewards are not currently linear (they are instead sqrt-weighted). So if you are voting for the purpose of curation (as intended) any argument you are making based on linear rewards and constant 'vote value' is incorrect. Voting for popular content is currently rewarded. However, the absolute amount is too low, a problem which came into being under n^2 when the developers, with good intentions (see below), cut curation rewards from 50% to 25%, increasing the share of rewards that went to posting, and strongly incentivizing self voting and other posting-reward-harvesting schemes (which did not, at all, begin with the shift to linear, it only changed form).
  2. Tacking your vote onto a popular post does not benefit you. You would not earn curation rewards; they would go to early voters. You would also not earn posting rewards unless you were engaged in some sort of self-voting or reward-sharing scheme, in which case this fails for exactly the reason I described previously (game theory devolves to stacking votes and splitting rewards or concentrating actual stake ownership into a small number of oligarchs).

you are acting like you do not understand the original intention behind the non-linear progression ?

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.

It was so more steem power would not result in a directly proportionally higher share of posting rewards.

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.)

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.

+

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.

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.