My New Steem Resolutions: What will you do in HF21?
Happy New Steem everyone!
Today felt pretty much like your normal first of January. Tired from a hectic day of closely following the implementation of the fork in order to immediately make the necessary update to our witness (@steempress) as soon as the fix to the experienced problem was provided to bring the chain back up and running for people to use asap. Tired from the following afterparty with other Steemians firing celebration downvotes on the trending page. But also slowly realizing that it is now a new time for Steem, with new opportunities to start a new.
For that reason, I thought it would be fun to share some of my own "New Steem Resolutions". And explain the things I want to try to do better in HF21 to make the place better and co-create the Steem that I want. So I hope you'll like some of my ideas, and I would also be curious to hear what you would like to do differently in HF21 as your #newsteem-resolutions.
Reflections on a new fork
First of all, I've had some mixed feelings about the details of the EIP. As I believe most of us do. On one side, I believe there was a need for change with abuse going on for too long unchallenged, too much stake going the way of bid bots, and users generally no longer participating in the intended proof of brain curation game. On the other hand, I fear that this may hurt smaller users and communities, as well as producing an environment that is overall less pleasant.
However, at the end of the day, it is we who make the effects of the changes. Thus instead of going on about how I think it could have been slightly better, I want to highlight some of the opportunities I believe it gives, as well as the things we can all do now that may add value to and grow Steem. After all, we are all very lucky to have the power and ability to shape the future social web that we have always wanted, one that others will look at and find worth joining. And while it is always easier to yell at others who we believe misbehaves, it is always a good idea to begin by making the best of out of one's own decisions. So without further delays, here are some of the things I want to do better and differently in HF21:
My new Steem resolutions
1 . Help make alternatives to bidbot delegations more attractive and give people a good reason to un-delegate their current bidbot delegations in favor of what I believe brings more value to Steem.
I've always been a harsh critic of bidbots and the negative effect they have on Steem. But rather than spending more time complaining to the bidbot owners of why their services are mostly harming Steem, I want to help make the alternatives more attractive. After all, the more good options we can create that makes holding Steem Power attractive, the more demand we will create for the token. Also, the moment the alternatives provide better returns than bidbots, it won't require any further arguments as stakeholders looking for the best returns will follow naturally. Additionally, I think the responsibility is also on us stakeholders who believe that Steemians bring more value to the platform when curating manually, or when they support those who do, to give Steemians better incentives to do so.
Thus, I've also undelegated my previous 20,000 SP delegation to @ocdb. I will instead spend the next week deciding where I can delegate it instead with no other expectations of returns other than that it makes the most positive impact to Steem possible. Which I really believe will benefit myself as a stakeholder more in the long-run than any bidbot returns at 16-17c.
To be fair to @ocdb, it is not the same as most other bidbots since it is a non-profit and exist primarily to provide quality creators sbetter opportunities to earn rewards.
2 . Spend more time looking for, upvoting, engaging with and sharing good #introduceyourself posts.
Increasing the size of the userbase through attracting more people and retaining new members ought to be the number 1 priority for anybody looking to help increase the value of Steem. And while I'm working hard these days to launch new onboarding and user retention mechanisms for SteemPress, I think one of the easiest and most impactful things we can do right now to assist this is to better welcome new Steemians on the traditional sites like steemit.com.
So to all of you curators out there, I hope you don't mind if I DM you once in a while with a link to a new introduction post I've considered curation worthy. I would also encourage everyone else to do the same, and not be shy to share such posts with me as well.
3 . Contribute more to growing curation projects.
Curators should be the big winners in HF21, and community-run curation projects in particular. Imo their work has been some of the most under-valued contributions made to Steem and one area where all stakeholders can and should step up their support.
While we've done a lot to support most of these projects through trailing their votes on steempress content to boost their curation rewards, I plan to do much more with my own stake. I hope to also make better tools available for others looking to add their support to a variety of projects, and also for steempress users to discover and become a part of different community projects.
4 . Not being afraid to downvote what I believe is the wrong allocation of rewards in order to bring more back to the real value-adding contributions. And assist in forming the right culture to support it.
Free downvotes is our new anti-abuse tool, so let's use it! No more low-effort content on the top of Trending that none of us wants to see represent Steem to curious outsiders considering if Steem is a place worth joining or investing in. No more spam comments taking a large chunk of the reward pool.
I've heard many express their concerns that downvoting will not happen sufficiently due to fears of retaliation. Well, not if we work together to create the right culture around downvotes, as well as to stand up in support of those who we believe are receiving unfair downvotes in retaliation. This may not always be the most profit minimalizing thing to do short term. But following good principles and establishing an environment that people want to be a part of and feel that they can express themselves without fair is fundamental to our growth.
Conclusion
In short. My new Steem resolutions are to do the things that I believe are right to create the Steem I want to be a part of. That I believe add more value and interest to our blockchain. I don't know how anyone can look at the current market price and not feel that spending time and effort min-maxing inflation-derived returns from a 16-17c coin is rather petty. When instead we can work to build the web we want, and take a big fat chunk of a trillion-dollar market that is online media.
So here is a kind reminder to any stakeholder or fellow Steemian who may have forgotten some basics during the depressive days of old Steem:
your ROI from STEEM is not the amount of new STEEM tokens you get per year.
instead,
ROI = New STEEM tokens earned * STEEM price +/- the change in the value of the SP you hold.
so note how both variables depend on the value of STEEM, and thus how you can help it grow over time. Additionally:
The returns on your curation is not curation rewards + author rewards. It is curation rewards + author rewards +/- the effect your behaviours have on the value of the tokens you earn and hold.
So think of how every vote can help, directly or indirectly, short term or long term, to increase the value of STEEM. And tell the next person who implies that min-maxing their STEEM/SBD/SP on votes or delegation is the same as min-maxing the ROI that they're missing the most important part of the puzzle.
New (Steem) profile picture
You may have also noticed that I recently changed my profile picture on Steem as well as the other places I'm active. While the old picture fit well for my initial plans for a space-related blog on Steem, it doesn't reflect my current activities as much. On top of that, dark colors and a serious look is very old steem. Colors and a cheeky smile is totally a lot more new steem!
Oh, and powering up 34,000 more Steem Power in preparation for the fork also felt good :)
So tell me in the comments what you think of some of my resolutions, or what you would like to add ! Or dump me a DM with a link to your post if you would rather make one yourself.
In any case, happy new Steem!
Fredrik
Voting for a post like this would be a start for me I guess. Finally voting honestly rather than selling or self voting doesn't feel prohibitively expensive.
On OCDB, while I applaud it's altruism compared to the other voting bots, I don't think it's really any better for the ecosystem as a whole. As a point of comparison, self voting entirely shifts 100% of a stakeholder's voting rewards into their own pocket (bad as it turns votes into staking returns and renders most of the inflation redundant). Selling votes through a voting bot takes 100% of the voting rewards and distributes it between the stakeholder, bot owner, and vote buyer, the latter two arguably even less deserving than the stakeholder. If the bot owner surrenders their cut, it just means slightly more for the other two, neither of which can be seen as doing the ecosystem a favor. The only way vote rewards can have value is if it reflects one's subjective opinion of the content itself, something that self voting and laundering votes through vote selling fails to do entirely. Again, I appreciate their altruism, but please correct me if my logic is wrong here.
This is why the EIP was necessary. They went with my numbers entirely so I have nothing to complain about. Ideally, I wanted to introduce a system where downvotes are also rewarded curation as it would introduce an opportunity cost to non consensus downvotes (if you could make money through good dvs, you're less likely to use them recklessly and/or selfishly) but limitations to dev resources prevented this. The numbers we ended up going with seem to be a sound first attempt. I can't think of a way in which we can come up with an economic system that has a half decent chance of keeping most stakeholders relatively honest without trade offs like authors and lower rewarded posts taking a hit. The idea is minimize the negative side effects while still having a good chance to get everyone using this thing honestly.
Overall, I believe the economics of this system should not be an afterthought like it has been and still seems to be. Far more resources should be devoted to theorizing and implementing improvements in this area instead of solely focusing on SMTs etc.
I'm very interested in how you would have altered and improved the EIP.
Finally, I'm surprised our platform hasn't taken off considering we have the actor who played Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies advocating for us.
Cheers,
Sorry for the late reply. Spent the past weeks in bed with a flu. So limited myself the last few days to doing only the most essential stuff (downvoting shit posts). And I thought your questions deserved a more thoughtful reply than what my feverish brain could put together.
First of all, I was in no way trying to make a case in favour of ocdb as something positive. It is still inferior to having the same stake used by individual curators to curate content. For the reasons you’ve stated, which I agree with 100%, but also because less people participating in the intended curation game leads directly to less engagement. Having people spend time finding content to vote on it makes them more likely to leave comments, and thus more life to the platform. It’s just that ocdb has a few less negatives than other bidbots, since it doesn’t contribute to the problem of promoting garbage to Trending the way that others do. I just thought that was worth pointing out to not lump them into the same bag.
In any case, I believe serious economic change was needed, which is why our witness (@steempress that I co-run with @howo) was in favour of the EIP back when Cervantes did the poll. (I don’t think we were as close to the top 20 back then, so perhaps our opinion wasn’t noticed by you). We’ve also been vocally against bidbots and in favour of manual curation and community use of downvotes. That’s why we recently launched the downvote management tool publicly despite knowing it could result in backlash against us. It’s also why for a year now we’ve supported 24 different manual curation projects and communities by trailing their vote on content published through our plugin. This to 1. Help make curation more rewarding and thus competitive with content-agnostic alternatives (self-voting/bidbots), and 2. Because we want to support the idea of proof of brain by letting a wide variety of curation projects looking at different topics contribute to our own curation.
I was hoping to have a chat with you about it, since we’re about to launch a new referral program and curation dashboard where people can support active curators. I would love to know which subjects you would be most interested in seeing us work to onboard, and if you would be interested in curating content from those areas should we attract quality creators.
So back to the questions about the EIP:
My main beef with the fork is mostly the fact that all the changes got lumped in together at the same time. I know they are intended to be complementary, and have read your post, but imo this makes it hard to isolate which of the actual changes have made positive or negative effects on curation, behaviours, and other KPIs. Perhaps it’s just the scientist in me who prefers a cleaner experiment! I also mentioned that I am concerned about the effect of the new curve on smaller users, communities and the curation of good comments. As you’ve said, there will be some trade-offs on the way to a system more functional, so this is where I would question if the trade-offs could outweigh the positives of that part of the EIP change.
At the end of the day I am more focused on the behavioural economics than the macro at this point. I want rules and incentives that are aligned with a growth strategy to improve user acquisition and onboarding above anything else. That’s why I believe we should be careful to make changes that have trade-offs which negatively affect the grassroot communities. Growth always happens at the margin, so even if the EIP reflects the best possible end-solution, one has to be careful with the short term implications if they result in user frustration or reduced motivation to stay at a time when users are most desperately needed.
With that in mind, if I were to look at the benefit / cost aspect of the different parts of the EIP that make the most combined sense right now. I may have suggested first going for free downvotes and improved curation rewards. Imo those are the two that contribute the most to provide the benefits that I know both of us wants (punishing content agnostic bidboting and circle jerking while incentivising good content discovery). I just think that most of the benefits we’ve already seen over the past week could have been accomplished by these changes alone. So while they are responsible for the benefits, I see the curve-change as the cause for most of the negative side effects without contributing as much to solving the problems as the downvotes and CR do (although this could only be short term).
I am also vary of how while solving one problem, we may create new problems when it comes to having people “vote honestly” to reflect their subjective judgement of what is good. With linear, it seemed more people were happy to just vote on comments they found nice, or small posts by people who they appreciated having on Steem. While arguably not contributing much to content discovery, I still see this behaviour as valuable in retaining users and making Steem a place where people find conversations and engagement more valuable to have. So if these votes starts turning into users instead auto voting the same popular creators, who usually get high rewards, at the 5 minute mark to get more curation rewards, then it will be a very costly considerable trade-off imo (like this example here https://steemit.com/newsteemit/@fishyculture/my-list-of-whales-to-curate). I even find myself doing it (although only on creators I find worth something). I’m not sure if you’re fine with that, assuming the content they auto-vote at 5 minutes is seen as quality by the community and not downvoted? At least in my mind, I would rather have many users just voting what they believe brought value to them. As I think this is good for user retention. When people try to get ahead of the pack on the popular Steemians, it results in very few getting any rewards and getting seen. So I would just like to see a system where people are more focused on 1. Curating whatever they liked for no other reasons than that they liked it (honest curation). And 2. That the way people vote helps improve the positive experience of more people on Steem, improves user retention, and thus allows the platform to grow.
So I guess my preference would have been to introduce the free downvotes and increased curation rewards in this fork, and considered having different reward curves with SMTs to observe what makes the most sense.
In any case, this is not arguing against your model when it comes to how we can improve content discovery, but it takes a few other factors that I see as important into consideration. At the end of the day I believe the only way to tell what works is to give it a whole-hearted attempt, which I intend to do and am doing.
And goddamnit, now I can't get that comparison out of my mind..
Great response fredrikaa, I didn't know you guys were behind Steempress and have given your witness an upvote.
Howo and I had our differences in the past, because of my high levels of self voting for around a year and a half. I can certainly understand that no one's a fan of that. But those economic rules seriously punished good actors the most. It seriously made it near impossibly expensive to do anything other than join the bandwagon and exploit. Once you see the equivalence between self voting and vote selling, then by some counts around 75%+ of the active stake were participating in this, all the way to the top.
Fighting abuse was going to basically cost you hundreds if not thousands of dollars a day out of pocket to downvote a random target just so 75% of those rewards saved would go into the pockets of other abusers. The common knowledge of the futility here prevented the system from self correcting.
The only rational course of action were to sell out or to join the abuse. And in hindsight I made the incorrect choice of those two options. If we rule out all the people who were too wealthy to care or had a stake too small for vote selling/self voting to be appealing, not that many were left who truly did not compromise their integrity (I think maybe literally less than 5 on the entire platform, don't quote me on that, it's a guess).
I did fight for economic reform for pretty much as long as I had been self voting (it wasn't that much at the beginning but grew as the entire platform got worse). I really thought it was so obvious that Inc would implement econ reform within a couple of weeks, at most a couple of months, and had every intention to stop as soon as a sound set of economic rules were introduced (as I did).
Sigh, it took waayyy too long. Anyway, it's not really the best justification I know, but that's where I was coming from.
There's a few things I'd want to reply to you about the economics and explain my choices in more detail, but not in public. Most of it I've justified and you've fully understood and agree with a lot of it with the exception of the curve. And even there, we sort of just have different predictions on the cost/benefit aspect. While I stand by it, mostly for reasons I've revealed as well as reasons I'll tell you in private, ultimately we may never know the road not traveled. But when we get a chance, we'll have a chat and hear each other out in more detail.
There are MANY economic improvements I'd like to make. They only wanted to spare very limited resources on this aspect of the blockchain. Overall I think the numbers were fairly sound considering they were a fairly blind speculative guess, and that they were made with considerable constraints in development resources as well as the constraints of the initial design.
https://steemit.com/golos/@ackza/buying-600-more-golos-staking-100-into-golos-power-and-earning-a-few-hundred-gbg-since-golos-classic-fork-when-golos-is-on-steem
this is the reaction u elicted from me, but i understand now u were just trying to steer the direction of teh content like u said... and u have 75K mroe SP than me so that also :)
By teh way I gave everyone in teh comments a few cents worth of steem upvotes! :)
i was madc but u came to steemspeak at least, ok good explanation, u can be picky i guess with ur 75K+ Steempower, but just write comment with flag plz
but about ur worry about engagement,m asking why used booster on a post with "0 engagement" well the boost si whatr will help me get mroe...
, not everyone can afford the type opf engagement u want theers not enuf users on steem... we need to do more of what im doing create content thast useful , im posting tools, ways to buy and sell stuff, people copy me and do what i do, it works, you will see my engagement comes back as more people come back to steem but EVERYONE is getting low comments right now.but read betwen the lines, look at what im doing with my INV tokens, and TASK and twitter and discord and banjo on those discords, sionging peopel up to steem en mass or tryingto set up systems to allow that, im trying to buy at least 1000 INvc every month or so, so i can get 10,000 a year onbaorded, if just a few thousand people start doing this with me it will make a big dent
i can see the path to actual organic demand for steempower bringing price up once @steemit @steem are done selling which is up to them but imn guessing they want 10% like @block.one
How did you manage to look younger lol? Anyway getting back in the game, feel free to share some awesome stuff. Been trying to look past two weeks, hardly found any.. it has gone downhill over the years. Hopefully the eip works well enough.
Think it's my new morning smoothie.
Will do! Where are you easiest to reach these days?
Will take some work from many sides to bring more and better creators here despite the low STEEM price. But I believe we have some cool new ideas that can make an impact. More on that (very) soon ;).
I'd like that smoothie recipe please xD
Anyway, always around slack / steemit / discord, just not communicating much past year.
1/2 cup Spinach
1/2 cup Kale
0.3 dl water
1 chopped up celery
1/2 - 1 squeezed lemon juice
1 Apple
1/2 Banana
a bit of turmeric and ginger root.
This is golden.
More people should understand this
Especially the
*STEEM pricefactor in it. When they realize the ROI is in getting STEEM to $2, rather than in dumping every day more STEEM at always lower rate, then we may be getting somewhere some day.There is also a self*facepalm degree of irony about the level of ROI understanding in the community when noticing that the bidbot fanboy who claimed bidbots will bring new investors to STEEM is now #1 witness.
Update: Meanwhile it seems our Steemhunt review comments have attracted 3 more front runners. Ah the beauty of 50/50. Think they noticed that EIP made the actual reward drop from $TU 0.1 to $TU 0.06? See also above, keyword
petty.Thanks! I may need to do a separate post on those last points which were not directly related to my "resolutions", but more to the mindset I want users to have in #newsteem.
All sounds good to me. If you can spare a little delegation for @tenkminnows it will support some small accounts or just follow the voting trail. I'm not so bothered about it earning from curation.
We are already getting better rewards distribution thanks to the free downvotes. I think some of the bigger accounts could do a little less self-voting to spread out further. They will still do well from curation rewards.
It is important to emphasise that helping the Steem community improve benefits is all. Self interest should not be the only concern.
We also do not want trending to be full of posts about Steem. Get some quantity creative posts up there.
Steem on!
GREAT idea... NewSteem Resolutions.
I am trying to get back to engagement, reading making comments..
I've started a small curation project for those who do not want to curate.
I've been cutting down on my snarky comments that hurt the NewSteem mood.
I also try to support people and projects that bring value to Steem, while I know it is subjective there are some of all categories who have been working heads down when the price was up and when the price is down. Those are the people we want to retain.
There are others who treat this like a cash cow. They can stay if they want, but hopefully they find very little support.
Wh00p! Happy New Steem!
Love this post and I might make my own as well - great initiative, as it breaks down for many people what the HardFork means apart from the technical details that might've flown around too much at some point and overwhelmed many users :-)
I believe curating both up and down is The New Steem Game we should play. I'm personally a manual curator, and apart from dedicated Steemians I'm also:
You can always DM me a link if you feel it's undervalued - or overvalued for that matter.
The other thing I'm going to keep an eye on is the SPS as I really wish for the most value adding projects to get funding - will have to get used to keeping an eye on more and more things on Steem, but hey, it keeps the game interesting :-)
Cheers and New Steem Fredrikaa looks more optimistic for the future than Old Steem Fredrikaa - love it! :D
Noticing this:
I think you would have better luck saving small accounts if you try to help those over 45 rep and with some type of track record.
We have a number of projects for the newest of the new. Then they are left to flounder after that. All small blogs got their current rewards cut 20-30% overnight. If you can find the positive people still willing to try, I think your help has a chance to work.
But if you want to go after the noobs, I suggest connecting with @heyhaveyamet who already curates and tries to support them and can surely use more help. Searching intro posts is hard going, might as well join forces.
Yes I completely agree that improving user retention is the key here. I'm hoping to announce a new initiative soon for steempress where I'll be adding direct support to those who wanna help curate the users in the demographic you describe. Also hope that we can bring on some more ambitious curation projects that are guilt with a Steem growth strategy in mind.
I like your new profile pic, So much brighter in color compared to your old one haha
Posted using Partiko iOS
Thanks! Yeah, it certainly looks and feels more positive. :)
sure send me links
Awesome! Where are you easiest to reach?
Leave me a comment somewhere, If you tag me, i might see it in a week or two. What ever works for you see how it goes.
Hi! Coming back to you here as I understood it was the best place for you.
I am reaching out to some key stakeholders I've had positive interactions with in the past, or who I see have supported the work that me and howo have done over the years. It's because we are now as close as we are to the top 20 with our witness (@steempress).
I was hoping that you would consider voting on our witness based on our work that I see you have voted on and engaged with in the past, as well as our contributions to testing forks, providing a public vision and growth strategy, putting our own resources towards growing Steem as we are with the new community challenges launched at Steemfest4, as well as other work we do to help steemit inc with communities, testing SMTs, etc.
Of course, I am also very curious to hear your input as a stakeholder as to what you would like to see more of on Steem, potential changes that could be needed, or other feedback as to how we can make this place closer to what you want it to be.
Hope to hear back from you, and always available for a Steem-related conversation!
easy choice. wish you all the best
Thank you! It really does mean a lot and makes a big difference :)
Heres a few cents my lego headed friend. everything is awesome for your comment payout.
thanks tytran
heres even more money, 2 cents + 2 dogecoin
and one ANX so now you have an @anoxfund Hedgefund token from EOS, its a pegged EOSIO token u can withdraw from steem-engine
and 100 Crypto Peso from @eosvenezuela
ow look at that bro, u got hooked up with steem-engine tokens!
Happy New Steem to you too bro. I hope it brings the positive changes we want. I'm keeping my eye out to make similar changes in delegation. We shall see how it plays out. ODBC put out a piece about changes they are making in curation, so I'll watch that for a while and see.
Thanks buddy! I just think it's better if there are more SP being used to curate by people. When you look for things to curate, you're more likely to leave a comment as opposed to if you just delegate to a bot... It also takes curation of users to keep them here, let them feel that it makes sense to spend time to make better posts, and thus attract more eyeballs and more growth.