I am seeing a few people saying it is not worth posting or commenting now, but even small accounts can still earn something. We need to wait and see how things are when it's settled down a bit.
A few people who bought votes on low quality posts have been complaining, but we've seen rage quitting before. I'm happy to see the community downvoting over-valued posts, but maybe this should happen to some of the posts by witnesses and projects too. Why should their posts be worth $100+? Some of them are still feeding the bid bots.
I'm not sure we want trending to be all posts about Steem. That has little appeal for most new visitors.
I am using my downvotes on anything that seems excessive, but I may avoid those who could do me real damage by retaliation. Big accounts are still self-voting and that can look greedy. They can vote for others and still do well from curation.
I'm also rethinking my voting strategy. I like to reward commenters, but a meaningful vote takes more vp now. I may vote up their posts instead with maybe a token vote on the comment.
New Steem is different. Let's see if it can be better.
I agree about the Steem projects and trending. Unfortunately, it is hard to avoid. People want to let people know when something new is available, and trending is best for that, but on the other hand, we don't want trending full of Steem meta.
I think communities will help a lot in that regard, you can subscribe to a Steem meta community to know what is going on without having trending flooded. We are a ways off from that and we still don't really know how communities will work so there is no guarantee there either.
We have a big problem, with bid bots.. Especially, the one like OCD with curators which are supposed to be watching on abuse.
Take for example this post:
I just did. I hadn't seen it before. You can't really expect everyone to see everything downvote everything. The system won't be perfect but it can still be a lot better the more people do their part. Even just you and @justineh downvoting it is better than nothing.
I wrote a post about it and I'm sure that some big fish have read it. Any results so far. Indeed I am being mocked.
And you know the one thing I took away from all that? The same rules don't apply for everyone!
In any case, Thanks for showing your concern.
It seems cynical to post about the hardfork whilst doing what it is supposed to deter! I don't think any post on Steem is really worth $50 given the size of the audience. It is almost impossible to make that much without bots unless a whale or two are your friends.
Actually, it is fun, to look through trending and look out for targets, that fit into your criterias, low retaliation chance, lot's of bibots, already downvoted by steem whales.
But of course, all this can backfire at some point.
I think it is the start of an improvement in Steem. Those who had been buying votes before will have to move away from that as they will just lose more money. Other schemes will spring up, but we have power to affect them. The big accounts can deal with those who retaliate.
I have the @tenkminnows voting on a load of people with about 6k SP delegated and that makes around 3 Steem per day just from curation. It will be a minnow in a few months. We need to rethink our voting strategy if we are going for optimal rewards, but I do not do that with my main account.
Yeah... as far as earning any money here on Steemit, I guess I will experiment a bit with my upvotes .... trying to only Upvote the very best Original content and be happy making a few pennies each day. I am earning more over on Publish0X these days with my posts....https://www.publish0x.com/?a=BDbDqjxdl2
The separate downvote Mana was the "missing link" I think. Because pre-HF21/22 had to choose between either positive rewarding (including curation rewards) and negative rewarding (without any curation rewards, and hindering the ability to upvote something else), as a result downvotes were relatively rare. When downvotes are rare and somebody does receive one, they can easily be offended, retaliate or leave, and/or take things personal.
But if you look at Youtube for example, even top quality videos get downvotes. Downvoting there is an integral part of the platform culture and it's about the ratio up/down that functions as a content quality metric.
Post HF21/22 downvoting as a separate tool, where an occasional downvote does not hinder the ability to upvote good content and hence the need to choose between downvoting X over upvoting Y is absent, it's everyone's "duty" to help disincentivise posting and upvoting utter junk. And as more and more people, accounts large and small, utilize their downvotes, it might also become an integral part of culture on Steem as well.
Yes, I am still against EIP. I was ambivalent about 50/50 and downvotes, so if you count those as successes, great. But the curve has made many users' steem experiences much less enjoyable. You try to rephrase the idea of votes being worth a smaller amount - that they're still worth the same number of rshares, just those rshares are worth a smaller amount when applied to a post with fewer rshares, but people's understanding is still correct. You can say that you don't mind that it makes "self-votes" worth less and note what you think is the corner case of comments being worth less... but in the end, it boils down to: I am encouraged to upvote content I don't care about because the author regularly receives rewards at least approaching the threshold, and I am consequently discouraged from upvoting not only comments, but also posts I love because the author has no track record of receiving rewards above $4. In fact, prior to HF21 (now 22, I guess), nearly all of my votes went to content from users who I liked engaging with but who did not receive much notice from others... not because their content was bad, but because they, too, belonged to communities that didn't interest whales. These communities draw lots of people in, many devoted to building communities organically. The fact that they drew the attention of no whales is not a sign that they did not bring value to the blockchain. Just that their content wasn't targeted to whales.
We talk about mass adoption? That's who the masses are. Even if trending is doing well and bidbots are going idle, wherever those freed up rewards are headed, it isn't into the accounts of the rank and file.
Also, I dunno. I feel hard pressed to NOT use a bot. I never have before, but now, seeing my rewards (from real people who read my blog) get cut in half, makes me want to rescue some of their value for them and to use a bot. I tried it a couple times. It made me feel yucky. But I feel like I have to. I don't expect to get noticed by a whale. It's not my goal. I love the curies I've gotten in the past, but engaging with my growing community, hosting joyful joke-telling contests, and sharing fast fiction are the things I love. I don't mind if I only get appreciation from the folks who appreciate me, but I don't like that it is the wrong thing for them to spend their VP on now. That pains me, too.
Do you understand what the curve has done? Do you understand how this makes it harder to engage with new users and good content? Do you understand how this motivates people to just follow the crowd rather than embrace one's own quirky preferences?
It is very hard to be a happy non-whale, non-abuser in this ecosystem. Were I an abuser, I'd be perfectly happy botting up to just below the trending threshold. The return is better than before because so much is so far below the curve.
I agree with that the curve is awful. What's the purpose? Why dividing stake across multiple accounts should be discouraged at all? Reducing rewards to authors that almost never gets above $3 per post organically is not worth whatever the purpose is.
wherever those freed up rewards are headed, it isn't into the accounts of the rank and file.
It is though. Mathematically it is literally going to increase every other payout, including the small ones. If there is enough taken off of those big milking payouts (and the experience of the last few days suggests this is very possible) then it can more than make up for the effect of the curve on the rank and file, or at a minimum reduce that effect greatly.
Firstly, I hope you're right. It hasn't happened yet. But in the next week or so we should see the impact. But it hasn't happened yet.
Secondly, defeatist? I'm here. I'm fighting for what I think would be a positive change. We disagree about the impact of the rewards curve. I'm fighting for it to be restored to linearity.
I understand that you disagree, but "defeatist" is the wrong word.
Maybe you aren't truly defeatist but just don't quite understand how downvoting works.
When rewards are removed from posts such as happened in a huge scale in the past week those rewards are redistributed to every other payout. Since the top posts are getting rekt by downvotes and the bid bots are complaining they aren't even getting vote buyers at all (because buyers are afraid of getting downvoted), then to say that it doesn't benefit the rank and file is simply incorrect. Certainly thousands, and possibly tens and thousand of STEEM have been redistributed to the rank and file. We've also seen at least one initiative promising to go after vote circles which will send even more rewards to the rank and file.
I'm frankly more concerned about what happens longer term and whether we will fall back into complacency once the novelty of slamming Trending and other milkers with downvotes wears off. In that case, it will stop helping the rank and file and we'll have to figure out what to do next. But for now it absolutely is helping the rank and file.
I suspect that it must be helping the middle earners and non-downvoted top earners mostly. I can only tell you what I've observed. In the weeks prior to HF21, I saw the people in my community (mainly freewriters) often had posts in the $0.30-$0.80 range. Those same users now generally have payouts in the $0.15-$0.60. Obviously there are many factors, but the overall truth of the matter is that, while I'm all for the downvoting of the top spam posts, the most vulnerable users are still seeing smaller payouts due to the curve.
I get that those rewards are being redistributed, but there just isn't enough to negate the effect of the curve (and because of the curve, more of that value is going to the next highest tier of payouts). But maybe eventually there will be.
Anyways, kudos to everyone for doing the downvoting! I hope that, indeed, no one loses interest and furthermore that everyone ups their curation game even more to reward the users not only who have the "best" posts, but also those who have posts that appeal to users who aren't likely to be whales.
Middle earners are rank-and-file, almost by definition. The very lowest earners are at an extreme, just like the highest. But the way the math works out, downvotes help everyone proportionately. If middle earners gain, say 20%, then low earners gain the same 20% (but smaller absolute amount of course).
Also, I never said it was completely negating the curve, but the downvotes do help. The curve exists to serve a purpose. Punishing responsible low-earning users isn't the intent at all, but is an unavoidable side effect. By downvoting a lot of abuse, some of that undesired side-effect can at least be offset, which is a good thing. Without the massive downvoting, the low rewards at the bottom would be even lower. So, yes, I would say it is helping.
Upping curation game will hopefully happen too, but it will take longer. People need to organize curation initiatives, etc. Just slamming the obvious milkers and other abusers with downvotes is faster and easier.
Looks like we have a similar understanding, but different priorities. That's fine as long as we get there before too long.
But I would add that I'd like to see numbers. I've been asking for numbers since the announcement of EIP in HF21 and haven't seen them. It's too late for those to matter now, I guess (though I'd still like them... what percentage of the rewards pool was going to abuse?) The new numbers I'd like to see are:
Are middle earners rank and file? Which is to say, do most top level posts earn $4-10? Or is that actually still a part of the top echelon? Is the freewrite community an outlier, or are we the norm? I think we're the norm, but it's hard to know, but if we are, there must be a lot of regular users out there who are getting $0.20/post. To me, if that's more than 50% of the crowd, that's the rank and file.
The curve exists to serve a purpose. Punishing responsible low-earning users isn't the intent at all, but is an unavoidable side effect.
I know it's not the intent, and I know the purpose, but is the cure worse than the disease? ATM, I'd say yes, especially considering that we didn't try the EIP without the curve first, which is what I'd like to see. Boy howdy.
I'm glad the downvotes help. They'd help even more in a linear reward curve. But sure, more curation. I'd even love to see a whale make a whitelist of "responsible low-earning users" to give those $0.20 upvotes that get them back to where they were. That'd go a long way to ameliorating the unavoidable side effect.
We didn't try EIP without the curve because our best available analysis and the consensus view of stakeholders, witnesses, and the developers is that it wouldn't work. (This does not mean 100% that it wouldn't work. but we have only a certain number and frequency of shots at this so we have to just use our best judgment to choose shots and take them.)
The limited amount of free voting power and the fact that there isn't any known way to compensate downvoters means that relying too much on downvoters doing a lot of hard work is a very dodgy proposition. The more obvious, more concentrated milking and abuse in Trending and voting circles is one thing. Digging through tens of thousands (and potentially more than that if incentives change) of tiny milking payouts is something else. The curve takes the place of someone needing to comb through and enormous number of low-payout posts and individually decide which are milking and which are not. That it is a broad brush is the unintended side effect, but, unfortunately, we simply don't know of a better way.
As far as giving low-earning voters blanket free upvotes simply for existing, I'm not in generally favor of that. It falls within the scope of curation to decide what rewards are appropriate and to a large extent that is independent of whatever rewards might have been previously (under a very broken system that, broadly speaking, was widely viewed by stakeholders, witnesses, and developers as a failure that was contributing to Steem's decline and not its success, though this does not mean that every single payout under the previous system was bad; that certainly was not the case).
As I said earlier, increased curation is still ramping up and will likely take some time. Most probably some low earning users will be picked up by increased curation (including increased votes that may be given because rewards are considered deserved by the curators and the curve requires it) and some will not, which is how this is supposed to work.
And this change provides that much more incentive to do so. I think we'll see people who didn't do it prior to 21 engaging in more bidbot usage. People who were paragons of Steem good behavior.
I wish there was a solution to have the spam-prevention of the curve and the ability to reward good comments with small rewards without taking such a hit on your voting power.
There is: Tipping.
It has worked in other crypto communities (though it is probably fair to say people are a lot more generous when the price is up) and could work on Steem too. It needs a low-friction UI.
If the current culture shift we have seen in the past couple days remains moving forward, in the long run, I’ll remain optimistic. If in a couple weeks things slide back to how they were I’ll just adapt and make changes.
Downvoting Pool
I’ve been downvoting a little bit not fully using it as of yet. Since I’m a little guy I need to still be smart about it. The great thing is hiding in numbers. There are still some posts I’d like to go flag but I’ll reframe from doing so as they are a bit more high risk.
It was interesting in the first couple days after a few giant posts went down for bid botting how more hesitant the market seemed and the lower barrier to entry was to get on trending. People seem to have more confidence in trying their luck again and it will be interesting to see how that plays out.
This was at least for now exactly what the platform needed.
Content Creator Shift
This year I’ve made some big changes, lots of trial and error, and got into some communities that were focused on similar goals as my own. Many people did not. I’ve had a lot of failures in getting to the next step but I expected it to be quite a long road and worth it when I do. We have known for a long time this HF was coming.
I think it’s a little too early to tell about the recent HF will be in the long run. I’ve been blessed so far under the new HF. I’ll admit better than I was expecting. If I end up earning around for the author portion where I was before or a little less I’ll feel like I’m heading in the right good direction.
There are some content creators out there I’ve noticed are not so happy. Truth is they been in decline for quite some time. They never adapted to using tribes. They are not in communities networking. They don’t promote others. They don’t promote their content outside of the Steem ecosystem. They don’t keep “some” SP. They want to be a “blogger” but I’m not quite sure they understand what that really is. Let alone being one on this platform.
I have not fully deployed my HF plans overall since we are still so recent into it. Some of it will take many months to build out as I have been for quite some time now. I am confident regardless that those plans will help ensure I further reduce my content costs, increase revenue sources, and remain completive in the market.
Overall I look forward to seeing the HF at play. Heck, I’ve even sold off some digital assets and power up around 500 SP on top of my normal post-earnings over the past couple weeks. If we lose some content creators along the way then tough we have been bleeding them for quite some time. I want people around who can adapt. Tot those who expect it to be easy. We need team players to boost each other and the platform up.
In my opinion, the results have been very positive for the most part. The 2.5 free downvotes have been an absolute game-changer. I haven't personally seen that much more manual curation by large accounts but it's too early to tell. Perhaps that's because there aren't too many large accounts to begin with. But I've seen @blocktrades put a few good posts to Trending by giving them a massive vote. Also, Trending seems to be populated by many ThreeSpeak posts upvoted by accounts controlled by ThreeSpeak. That's all very positive.
What I believe is that powerful app accounts actually tend to be among the best curators because their incentives are perfectly aligned with what the company owning the app is trying to achieve - provided that the app itself has a sound long-term business case of providing goods or services consumers are willing to pay fiat for.
I've used a few downvotes on trending topics that seemed egregiously bidbotted, but it makes me pretty nervous to do so because I don't want to make enemies of people who have the resources to make my life here miserable if they want to. But the trending page is still dominated by announcements (which are arguably "legitimate" uses of bidbots) or Steem boosterism, which I generally don't find interesting and which people who aren't already here would probably find off-putting so I think that's still not a great trending page if the goal is broader adoption even though it's "organically trending" among people who are already here. Maybe the old trending stuff was even worse, I only looked occasionally so I don't have a solid basis for comparison. It would be nice if some of the advocates for these changes would find a way to concretely measure how things are better/worse now.
I am still pretty negative about the economic changes.
The best outcome so far imo is that I actually want to look at Trending. Not because of its content necessarily, but because I am motivated to do something about how it looks.
This is only positive, no matter what reasons people may have to pay attention to it imo. Because with more eyeballs being on Trending the value of having one's content there goes up a lot compared to when most users take it for granted to be a depressing dumpster.
Hopefully, this result in more demand to have one's content at Trending generally. Combined with an additional effort to make sure that content that finds its way there are seen as deserving its spot by others.
So far so good imo. Although I'm still waiting to see the effect on comments and small user/community motivation. Still need a lot of work to ensure good curation takes place there.
I am seeing a few people saying it is not worth posting or commenting now, but even small accounts can still earn something. We need to wait and see how things are when it's settled down a bit.
A few people who bought votes on low quality posts have been complaining, but we've seen rage quitting before. I'm happy to see the community downvoting over-valued posts, but maybe this should happen to some of the posts by witnesses and projects too. Why should their posts be worth $100+? Some of them are still feeding the bid bots.
I'm not sure we want trending to be all posts about Steem. That has little appeal for most new visitors.
I am using my downvotes on anything that seems excessive, but I may avoid those who could do me real damage by retaliation. Big accounts are still self-voting and that can look greedy. They can vote for others and still do well from curation.
I'm also rethinking my voting strategy. I like to reward commenters, but a meaningful vote takes more vp now. I may vote up their posts instead with maybe a token vote on the comment.
New Steem is different. Let's see if it can be better.
I agree about the Steem projects and trending. Unfortunately, it is hard to avoid. People want to let people know when something new is available, and trending is best for that, but on the other hand, we don't want trending full of Steem meta.
I think communities will help a lot in that regard, you can subscribe to a Steem meta community to know what is going on without having trending flooded. We are a ways off from that and we still don't really know how communities will work so there is no guarantee there either.
I get it. And I completely agree.
We have a big problem, with bid bots.. Especially, the one like OCD with curators which are supposed to be watching on abuse.
Take for example this post:
https://steemit.com/steem/@svemirac/hf22-is-ready-to-go
Do you think this post worth $48.04 ?
In my opinion that post wasn't even supposed to be boosted with bid bots. But no one downvoted it a part @justineh and me.
On paper this HF has been very well thought out but will come up against the human greediness.
I just did. I hadn't seen it before. You can't really expect everyone to see everything downvote everything. The system won't be perfect but it can still be a lot better the more people do their part. Even just you and @justineh downvoting it is better than nothing.
I haven’t done any downvoting yet, still understanding the process.
But who is the final arbiter of quality content?
Let us wait for the entire community to be accustomed to this new changes.
Some can make educational campaigns about “quality” content. Post it. (The irony will be, that post will then get downvoted I’m sure)
Posted using Partiko iOS
You are.
Me, the community.
I wrote a post about it and I'm sure that some big fish have read it. Any results so far. Indeed I am being mocked.
And you know the one thing I took away from all that? The same rules don't apply for everyone!
In any case, Thanks for showing your concern.
It seems cynical to post about the hardfork whilst doing what it is supposed to deter! I don't think any post on Steem is really worth $50 given the size of the audience. It is almost impossible to make that much without bots unless a whale or two are your friends.
Actually, it is fun, to look through trending and look out for targets, that fit into your criterias, low retaliation chance, lot's of bibots, already downvoted by steem whales.
But of course, all this can backfire at some point.
I think it is the start of an improvement in Steem. Those who had been buying votes before will have to move away from that as they will just lose more money. Other schemes will spring up, but we have power to affect them. The big accounts can deal with those who retaliate.
I’m earning almost nothing with my 5,000 Steem power. Luckily I am making more on my Videos these days.
I have the @tenkminnows voting on a load of people with about 6k SP delegated and that makes around 3 Steem per day just from curation. It will be a minnow in a few months. We need to rethink our voting strategy if we are going for optimal rewards, but I do not do that with my main account.
Yeah... as far as earning any money here on Steemit, I guess I will experiment a bit with my upvotes .... trying to only Upvote the very best Original content and be happy making a few pennies each day. I am earning more over on Publish0X these days with my posts....https://www.publish0x.com/?a=BDbDqjxdl2
I don't have time to start playing with another site. I have built up something with Steem and am happy to keep going with that.
That’s a good idea. I am probably too diversified.
They're saying that in posts and comments? /facepalm
I hope it will get better day by day, planning to power up another 10k steem.
Everybody should be armed with higher sp and good common sense and fair play.
Posted using Partiko iOS
The separate downvote Mana was the "missing link" I think. Because pre-HF21/22 had to choose between either positive rewarding (including curation rewards) and negative rewarding (without any curation rewards, and hindering the ability to upvote something else), as a result downvotes were relatively rare. When downvotes are rare and somebody does receive one, they can easily be offended, retaliate or leave, and/or take things personal.
But if you look at Youtube for example, even top quality videos get downvotes. Downvoting there is an integral part of the platform culture and it's about the ratio up/down that functions as a content quality metric.
Post HF21/22 downvoting as a separate tool, where an occasional downvote does not hinder the ability to upvote good content and hence the need to choose between downvoting X over upvoting Y is absent, it's everyone's "duty" to help disincentivise posting and upvoting utter junk. And as more and more people, accounts large and small, utilize their downvotes, it might also become an integral part of culture on Steem as well.
Yes, I am still against EIP. I was ambivalent about 50/50 and downvotes, so if you count those as successes, great. But the curve has made many users' steem experiences much less enjoyable. You try to rephrase the idea of votes being worth a smaller amount - that they're still worth the same number of rshares, just those rshares are worth a smaller amount when applied to a post with fewer rshares, but people's understanding is still correct. You can say that you don't mind that it makes "self-votes" worth less and note what you think is the corner case of comments being worth less... but in the end, it boils down to: I am encouraged to upvote content I don't care about because the author regularly receives rewards at least approaching the threshold, and I am consequently discouraged from upvoting not only comments, but also posts I love because the author has no track record of receiving rewards above $4. In fact, prior to HF21 (now 22, I guess), nearly all of my votes went to content from users who I liked engaging with but who did not receive much notice from others... not because their content was bad, but because they, too, belonged to communities that didn't interest whales. These communities draw lots of people in, many devoted to building communities organically. The fact that they drew the attention of no whales is not a sign that they did not bring value to the blockchain. Just that their content wasn't targeted to whales.
We talk about mass adoption? That's who the masses are. Even if trending is doing well and bidbots are going idle, wherever those freed up rewards are headed, it isn't into the accounts of the rank and file.
Also, I dunno. I feel hard pressed to NOT use a bot. I never have before, but now, seeing my rewards (from real people who read my blog) get cut in half, makes me want to rescue some of their value for them and to use a bot. I tried it a couple times. It made me feel yucky. But I feel like I have to. I don't expect to get noticed by a whale. It's not my goal. I love the curies I've gotten in the past, but engaging with my growing community, hosting joyful joke-telling contests, and sharing fast fiction are the things I love. I don't mind if I only get appreciation from the folks who appreciate me, but I don't like that it is the wrong thing for them to spend their VP on now. That pains me, too.
Do you understand what the curve has done? Do you understand how this makes it harder to engage with new users and good content? Do you understand how this motivates people to just follow the crowd rather than embrace one's own quirky preferences?
It is very hard to be a happy non-whale, non-abuser in this ecosystem. Were I an abuser, I'd be perfectly happy botting up to just below the trending threshold. The return is better than before because so much is so far below the curve.
I agree with that the curve is awful. What's the purpose? Why dividing stake across multiple accounts should be discouraged at all? Reducing rewards to authors that almost never gets above $3 per post organically is not worth whatever the purpose is.
It is though. Mathematically it is literally going to increase every other payout, including the small ones. If there is enough taken off of those big milking payouts (and the experience of the last few days suggests this is very possible) then it can more than make up for the effect of the curve on the rank and file, or at a minimum reduce that effect greatly.
Your attitude is defeatist.
Firstly, I hope you're right. It hasn't happened yet. But in the next week or so we should see the impact. But it hasn't happened yet.
Secondly, defeatist? I'm here. I'm fighting for what I think would be a positive change. We disagree about the impact of the rewards curve. I'm fighting for it to be restored to linearity.
I understand that you disagree, but "defeatist" is the wrong word.
Maybe you aren't truly defeatist but just don't quite understand how downvoting works.
When rewards are removed from posts such as happened in a huge scale in the past week those rewards are redistributed to every other payout. Since the top posts are getting rekt by downvotes and the bid bots are complaining they aren't even getting vote buyers at all (because buyers are afraid of getting downvoted), then to say that it doesn't benefit the rank and file is simply incorrect. Certainly thousands, and possibly tens and thousand of STEEM have been redistributed to the rank and file. We've also seen at least one initiative promising to go after vote circles which will send even more rewards to the rank and file.
I'm frankly more concerned about what happens longer term and whether we will fall back into complacency once the novelty of slamming Trending and other milkers with downvotes wears off. In that case, it will stop helping the rank and file and we'll have to figure out what to do next. But for now it absolutely is helping the rank and file.
I suspect that it must be helping the middle earners and non-downvoted top earners mostly. I can only tell you what I've observed. In the weeks prior to HF21, I saw the people in my community (mainly freewriters) often had posts in the $0.30-$0.80 range. Those same users now generally have payouts in the $0.15-$0.60. Obviously there are many factors, but the overall truth of the matter is that, while I'm all for the downvoting of the top spam posts, the most vulnerable users are still seeing smaller payouts due to the curve.
I get that those rewards are being redistributed, but there just isn't enough to negate the effect of the curve (and because of the curve, more of that value is going to the next highest tier of payouts). But maybe eventually there will be.
Anyways, kudos to everyone for doing the downvoting! I hope that, indeed, no one loses interest and furthermore that everyone ups their curation game even more to reward the users not only who have the "best" posts, but also those who have posts that appeal to users who aren't likely to be whales.
Middle earners are rank-and-file, almost by definition. The very lowest earners are at an extreme, just like the highest. But the way the math works out, downvotes help everyone proportionately. If middle earners gain, say 20%, then low earners gain the same 20% (but smaller absolute amount of course).
Also, I never said it was completely negating the curve, but the downvotes do help. The curve exists to serve a purpose. Punishing responsible low-earning users isn't the intent at all, but is an unavoidable side effect. By downvoting a lot of abuse, some of that undesired side-effect can at least be offset, which is a good thing. Without the massive downvoting, the low rewards at the bottom would be even lower. So, yes, I would say it is helping.
Upping curation game will hopefully happen too, but it will take longer. People need to organize curation initiatives, etc. Just slamming the obvious milkers and other abusers with downvotes is faster and easier.
Looks like we have a similar understanding, but different priorities. That's fine as long as we get there before too long.
But I would add that I'd like to see numbers. I've been asking for numbers since the announcement of EIP in HF21 and haven't seen them. It's too late for those to matter now, I guess (though I'd still like them... what percentage of the rewards pool was going to abuse?) The new numbers I'd like to see are:
Are middle earners rank and file? Which is to say, do most top level posts earn $4-10? Or is that actually still a part of the top echelon? Is the freewrite community an outlier, or are we the norm? I think we're the norm, but it's hard to know, but if we are, there must be a lot of regular users out there who are getting $0.20/post. To me, if that's more than 50% of the crowd, that's the rank and file.
I know it's not the intent, and I know the purpose, but is the cure worse than the disease? ATM, I'd say yes, especially considering that we didn't try the EIP without the curve first, which is what I'd like to see. Boy howdy.
I'm glad the downvotes help. They'd help even more in a linear reward curve. But sure, more curation. I'd even love to see a whale make a whitelist of "responsible low-earning users" to give those $0.20 upvotes that get them back to where they were. That'd go a long way to ameliorating the unavoidable side effect.
We didn't try EIP without the curve because our best available analysis and the consensus view of stakeholders, witnesses, and the developers is that it wouldn't work. (This does not mean 100% that it wouldn't work. but we have only a certain number and frequency of shots at this so we have to just use our best judgment to choose shots and take them.)
The limited amount of free voting power and the fact that there isn't any known way to compensate downvoters means that relying too much on downvoters doing a lot of hard work is a very dodgy proposition. The more obvious, more concentrated milking and abuse in Trending and voting circles is one thing. Digging through tens of thousands (and potentially more than that if incentives change) of tiny milking payouts is something else. The curve takes the place of someone needing to comb through and enormous number of low-payout posts and individually decide which are milking and which are not. That it is a broad brush is the unintended side effect, but, unfortunately, we simply don't know of a better way.
As far as giving low-earning voters blanket free upvotes simply for existing, I'm not in generally favor of that. It falls within the scope of curation to decide what rewards are appropriate and to a large extent that is independent of whatever rewards might have been previously (under a very broken system that, broadly speaking, was widely viewed by stakeholders, witnesses, and developers as a failure that was contributing to Steem's decline and not its success, though this does not mean that every single payout under the previous system was bad; that certainly was not the case).
As I said earlier, increased curation is still ramping up and will likely take some time. Most probably some low earning users will be picked up by increased curation (including increased votes that may be given because rewards are considered deserved by the curators and the curve requires it) and some will not, which is how this is supposed to work.
Most abusers already do that prior to the change. Only the egomaniacs loved to see their own faces on the front page day in and day out.
And this change provides that much more incentive to do so. I think we'll see people who didn't do it prior to 21 engaging in more bidbot usage. People who were paragons of Steem good behavior.
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Well, it's up to them to figure out the 20 Steem ordeal so they actually make a ROI.
Has this been done for people with more money than the likes of me? Thanks mike
There is: Tipping.
It has worked in other crypto communities (though it is probably fair to say people are a lot more generous when the price is up) and could work on Steem too. It needs a low-friction UI.
If the current culture shift we have seen in the past couple days remains moving forward, in the long run, I’ll remain optimistic. If in a couple weeks things slide back to how they were I’ll just adapt and make changes.
Downvoting Pool
I’ve been downvoting a little bit not fully using it as of yet. Since I’m a little guy I need to still be smart about it. The great thing is hiding in numbers. There are still some posts I’d like to go flag but I’ll reframe from doing so as they are a bit more high risk.
It was interesting in the first couple days after a few giant posts went down for bid botting how more hesitant the market seemed and the lower barrier to entry was to get on trending. People seem to have more confidence in trying their luck again and it will be interesting to see how that plays out.
This was at least for now exactly what the platform needed.
Content Creator Shift
This year I’ve made some big changes, lots of trial and error, and got into some communities that were focused on similar goals as my own. Many people did not. I’ve had a lot of failures in getting to the next step but I expected it to be quite a long road and worth it when I do. We have known for a long time this HF was coming.
I think it’s a little too early to tell about the recent HF will be in the long run. I’ve been blessed so far under the new HF. I’ll admit better than I was expecting. If I end up earning around for the author portion where I was before or a little less I’ll feel like I’m heading in the right good direction.
There are some content creators out there I’ve noticed are not so happy. Truth is they been in decline for quite some time. They never adapted to using tribes. They are not in communities networking. They don’t promote others. They don’t promote their content outside of the Steem ecosystem. They don’t keep “some” SP. They want to be a “blogger” but I’m not quite sure they understand what that really is. Let alone being one on this platform.
I have not fully deployed my HF plans overall since we are still so recent into it. Some of it will take many months to build out as I have been for quite some time now. I am confident regardless that those plans will help ensure I further reduce my content costs, increase revenue sources, and remain completive in the market.
Overall I look forward to seeing the HF at play. Heck, I’ve even sold off some digital assets and power up around 500 SP on top of my normal post-earnings over the past couple weeks. If we lose some content creators along the way then tough we have been bleeding them for quite some time. I want people around who can adapt. Tot those who expect it to be easy. We need team players to boost each other and the platform up.
In my opinion, the results have been very positive for the most part. The 2.5 free downvotes have been an absolute game-changer. I haven't personally seen that much more manual curation by large accounts but it's too early to tell. Perhaps that's because there aren't too many large accounts to begin with. But I've seen @blocktrades put a few good posts to Trending by giving them a massive vote. Also, Trending seems to be populated by many ThreeSpeak posts upvoted by accounts controlled by ThreeSpeak. That's all very positive.
What I believe is that powerful app accounts actually tend to be among the best curators because their incentives are perfectly aligned with what the company owning the app is trying to achieve - provided that the app itself has a sound long-term business case of providing goods or services consumers are willing to pay fiat for.
I've used a few downvotes on trending topics that seemed egregiously bidbotted, but it makes me pretty nervous to do so because I don't want to make enemies of people who have the resources to make my life here miserable if they want to. But the trending page is still dominated by announcements (which are arguably "legitimate" uses of bidbots) or Steem boosterism, which I generally don't find interesting and which people who aren't already here would probably find off-putting so I think that's still not a great trending page if the goal is broader adoption even though it's "organically trending" among people who are already here. Maybe the old trending stuff was even worse, I only looked occasionally so I don't have a solid basis for comparison. It would be nice if some of the advocates for these changes would find a way to concretely measure how things are better/worse now.
I am still pretty negative about the economic changes.
The best outcome so far imo is that I actually want to look at Trending. Not because of its content necessarily, but because I am motivated to do something about how it looks.
This is only positive, no matter what reasons people may have to pay attention to it imo. Because with more eyeballs being on Trending the value of having one's content there goes up a lot compared to when most users take it for granted to be a depressing dumpster.
Hopefully, this result in more demand to have one's content at Trending generally. Combined with an additional effort to make sure that content that finds its way there are seen as deserving its spot by others.
So far so good imo. Although I'm still waiting to see the effect on comments and small user/community motivation. Still need a lot of work to ensure good curation takes place there.