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RE: Programming Diary #28: Thoughts on the problem of overvaluation

in Steem Dev2 months ago

This literally frames the EXACT thought of the struggling new author on this site. I know because I'm one of them. Add in uneven rewarding from the SCx accounts and you're going to have issues keeping good creators here.

If I am an author who is struggling to earn rewards by producing relevant, organic content, this is demoralizing me. If this sort of content is what dominates, eventually, I will probably respond in one of two ways:
By leaving; or
By setting up my own daily digital pollution factory.

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 2 months ago 

I think the uneven rewarding from SC* accounts is sort of unavoidable, but even that might be mitigated if the digital pollution weren't sucking so much air out of the rewards pool.

True. One other thing I've learned is that those high prize pools favor the curators and, in effect, the users with high SP, and in the process, give the small share to the actual creator of the content. Which is off, in my opinion. For example, I had no clue that a $150.00 post would break down to approximately $42.00 for the author. I thought it would be 50-50 between author/curator...it is not. Kind of demeaning, to be honest. Curating for a couple of months opened my eyes to quite a few things. I plan on making a post about all of that as soon as I have some free time.

 2 months ago 

As I understand, it actually should be 50% to the author (and beneficiaries) and 50% to the curators, but you have to be careful with how you understand the total value. Up until recently, the total value displayed included TRX distribution that wasn't happening any more, and with Tron's relatively high price that was inflating the reported totals by a lot. That was fixed now, so the discrepancy should be smaller now. But, I believe that the reported total is based on the median price of STEEM over 3 1/2 days, so if the STEEM price is volatile, the value at payout time can be very different from the price that's reported on the exchanges. (this can move the actual payout higher or lower, but the discrepancies should balance out over time)

Update:

I guess this is the one you're talking about?

What happened here is what you expected. The post paid out at $166.40. Of that, $83.20/50% went to curators, and $84.68/50% went to the author and beneficiary. Of that 50%, $42.34/25% in beneficiary rewards disappeared from the post's value at payout time, but it was distributed as beneficiary rewards. The other $42.34/25% went to you and stays in the reported value of the post. There are some rounding discrepancies in there - probably due to voters who didn't contribute enough to get rewarded, I guess, but for the most part it was a 50/50 split where half went to author + beneficiary and half went to curators.

For whatever reason, the web site and the post's reported value just don't remember the payouts to beneficiaries after a post pays out.

 2 months ago (edited)

That's exactly how it is. I've been working on this recently because I wanted to check the pending payout amounts again by resetting the TRX/VESTS ratio. Unfortunately, they're still not correct because there's still an error in the Condenser (which only becomes apparent when the haircut rule takes effect, which probably didn't happen when the Condenser was being developed). I will suggest a fix for this.

To the display of the payout amounts:
It does not actually take the beneficiaries into account. The reason for this is relatively simple. The blockchain does not return this data. It would have to be calculated separately. And this is not entirely trivial because the curator amounts are not always fully 50 %. As you know, for votes that are made within the first few minutes, the curator contributions are reduced. I have already thought about this. In this context, I suspect an inaccuracy in Steemworld, which I had already reported to Steemchiller. Once this has been clarified, I can suggest changes.

cc @philhughes

 2 months ago 

Unfortunately, they're still not correct because there's still an error in the Condenser (which only becomes apparent when the cut-off rule takes effect, which probably didn't happen when the Condenser was being developed). I will suggest a fix for this.

Ah... I knew there was a reason why I didn't like pegging the so-called "median" to track the haircut price. I thought it was harmless, but it always seemed like a kludge. But yeah, of course any value depending on that would be wrong. By a lot, right now.

I guess the argument was that it's not wrong in terms of the internal SBD price, but it's labeled with a "$" (at least in the US), and of course the external SBD price isn't anywhere near the peg, so reporting in terms of SBDs is confusing, at best.

 last month 

I compared this with one of your posts:

This was the display according to the current code:
remlaps pending steemit_old.png

... and so it should actually be correct:

remlaps pending steemit_new.png

The total amount in $ does not change.
The only difference is that 31 STEEM are not paid out. However, the amount for SP is correct if the curator amounts are also included.
I'll have to take a closer look to see where the code needs to be changed and which amounts should be included.

 last month 

I'm confused about where the second screen shot comes from, but I think you're showing basically the same as what I was seeing.

  • If I look at the STEEM/SP of a post before payout time, the number of STEEM/SP matches up with the displayed payout value in dollars.
  • However, if I look at what actually gets distributed, the value of the rewards is off from the post value by the haircut percentage.

Here's a an example after payout time with no beneficiary rewards in play.

At the haircut price, $6.20 is about 24 STEEM. At actual dollar value, it's about 36. The actual rewards seem to match the haircut price.

Which means the actual dollar amount of the distributed STEEM and SP would be closer to 2 * $4.05 = $8.10. Similarly, it looks to me like your second screenshot probably matches the STEEM/SP distribution, but not the dollar value. The dollar value of 42 STEEM is in the neighborhood of $7.14, not $10.93.

No idea how I have never noticed this before. It's a substantial difference. Or maybe I just forgot, but it seems like something I would have remembered. Or maybe I had overlooked it due to the previous inclusion of TRX values.

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Thank you for explaining that. I'm still a novice on how this all works, which leads to some confusion on my end. I feel sort of silly that I didn't realize this on my own, but glad I asked nonetheless.

Oh - I'm excited! Since you've really been looking at the whole theatre quite recently, almost "from the outside", there could be some remarkable insights...

 2 months ago 

As I understand, it actually should be 50% to the author (and beneficiaries) and 50% to the curators, but you have to be careful with how you understand the total value. Up until recently, the total value displayed included TRX distribution that wasn't happening any more, and with Tron's relatively high price that was inflating the reported totals by a lot. That was fixed now, so the discrepancy should be smaller now. But, I believe that the reported total is based on the median price of STEEM over 3 1/2 days, so if the STEEM price is volatile, the value at payout time can be very different from the price that's reported on the exchanges. (this can move the actual payout higher or lower, but the discrepancies should balance out over time)

This is from a payout four days ago. In this example, curators are getting almost double. It's the same for every payout among the curator report posts I've looked at. Is this some sort of issue left over from the TRX removal? It seems odd to me that the curator pool would be that large versus the author reward.

 2 months ago 

ok. Our replies crossed in the mail😉. See my other reply. The web site just doesn't report the beneficiary numbers after payout time, but it did split 50/50.

That was what was confusing me. I'm glad I asked now; thank you for explaining. I was looking at it wrong. But see, it's things like this that go unanswered that further hurt this site. Without a way to ask questions, it gets left up to the imagination, which = people leaving in the process once frustration fully sets in.

Yes, after that I also moaned a lot ;-)) By the way, a good place to ask questions and get well-founded answers is the Talk Channel in the WOX... Mostly no one uses it.

 2 months ago (edited)

Again, the problem is that we have to look at the comments of a post several times (as I did with this post :-) ). The questions that are usually raised in the post are less interesting for me.

 2 months ago 

Yeah, we can definitely use better documentation and places to ask questions. These are the sorts of things that we can do in a decentralized way if we grow the community enough, but it's sort of a catch-22. In the meantime, I'm happy to answer questions like these whenever I am able.

Coincidentally, this reporting with beneficiary rewards is exactly why I calculated the total the way I did in the browser extension. Here's what the curator's overlay shows for that post:

As described above:

Total value is calculated as total_pending_payout_value + 2 ( curator_payout_value ) in order to handle values before and after payout time and to also include the post value that went to beneficiaries at payout time.

 2 months ago 

As an approximate value, this calculation is absolutely fine.