Vote Values

in #steem5 years ago

The most common complaint that I've heard recently is concerning vote value, that it no longer appears to have value unless you vote a popular author. This perception needs to be addressed, because it is cited as a reason for unfairness that isn't accurate, in two ways:

  1. Your vote on a per SP basis is worth exactly the same as any other. You cannot focus on just the value before and after the vote.
  2. From a pure curation perspective, no matter where you vote, if you are the last voter, your curation reward is the same. Votes that are on top have the potential boost your curation reward by a significant margin. Posts that are not yet valuable but should be valuable have significantly more upside. Find those gems and share them, and get that bonus.

Vote Worth

The way the system for payout works is that every post and comment has an internal score which is linear/proportional to your SP. You may have heard of the term rshares being thrown around, and that's exactly it. The amount of rshares you can put on a post is directly proportional to SP.

When it comes to payout, the curve computes a weighting for the post where it favors higher scores more, and rewards go proportional to this weighting.

It has always worked this way. It did so when Steem was just a baby where it favored high scores by a large margin (n^2), got changed to be entirely proportional, and now is back to favoring higher scores a touch (EIP).

So the first point, just from the inner rshare scoring point, is:

  • Your vote is worth as much as anyone else's on a per SP basis.

Again, it's not about the individual vote. Votes can be countered on a per SP basis.

Relative Value

Because of the way the weighting works, just imagine that 100 people are voting on a post with the same amount of power. Each person will incrementally add more value to the post than the voter before, but from the author's perspective, each person is equally as valuable to the post, because if you shuffled the order of the votes the result for the author is exactly the same.

  • The only thing that matters in terms of how much a post pays is the amount of rshares on the post at payout time (well, also a function of how much other posts got and the size of reward pool).

So don't focus on the value at the time of the vote, you are contributing to getting the author to a higher rshare level.

Your vote alone isn't what should determine a payout. We are a community and it should be driven by as many inputs as possible.

You might say, well it's still not fair. Single large stakeholders can single-handedly push posts to a very high value. But these can and arguably should be countered if it is not justified. Again, we need the input from as many sources as possible. So use the downvotes. If you are scared of retaliation, go with safety in numbers.

Curation Value

So we already covered why it's wrong to assume that voting for small value posts is not meaningful from the incremental value you might have given to the post.

But there's another big benefit for voting on posts that don't have value but you think you should have value.

Chances are, others would think the same, and being first to vote on these gives you much bigger curation rewards. It emphasizes the importance of having a network so that we (the larger Steem community) collectively can find posts and boost them to a suitable value.

Last Voter Property

As mentioned above, there is a little known property for how the voting system is designed. If you are the last voter on a post, your curation reward is the same whether you voted on a low value post or a high value post.

This is an elegant balanced property, because you might be reading my previous thoughts and thinking, well why should I even vote on already big posts from a curator-centric perspective?

Because you get something from it too. The situation reflected is the same. The question is, if you vote on something, what are the odds that it gets voted higher after?

Even on an already popular post, it's possible that it becomes even more popular. Or on a post that you voted early, it's possible it remains undiscovered. Unless of course you know for sure it will get more votes (e.g if you head a curation trail).

Note this also means if the value of the post goes down after your vote via downvotes, it reduces your curation reward as well. More reasons to downvote something that doesn't deserve it, really.

Summary

So the TL/DR is at the top, but let's do it again:

  • Don't obsess at how much your vote bumped a post by. Focus on where that post has the potential to be and help it get there.
  • Vote on what you like and build your network that thinks similarly.
  • You have more potential voting on gems that haven't been discovered, if you can get it discovered.
  • Hide and downvote.

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Thanks for getting me up to speed a bit with these developments my friend. Love how often the words "collective" and "collectively" appear in this, even if I've been absent on Discord lately. Thanks again for this clear explanation of the renewed (yet very familiar) voting system :-)

@eonwarped
Now I am not the most clever old man that I know.
What you are saying is that we should search for new posts that we think might have value and vote on them in the first 5 minutes???
Blessings!

Ah but be careful about that. Voting in the first 5 minutes has a penalty too. At five minutes or later there's no penalty, and at 0 minutes you will not get any curation rewards. So if you can vote at 5 minutes when nobody else is there it is better. Otherwise it's a game you can read about in another comment with steemfow.

Ah! You see and I don't my friend.
There's so many tricks to this thing and all that we are doing is trying to raise funds for our charity work.
But I will keep on trying.
Thank you for the kind reply!
Blessings!

Excellent write-up. #newsteem culture says vote at 100%, Resteem, and see if more people arrive 😬

Might be a tad late 😬. Wait wait, let me see if I can find more...

Why there is focus on vote timing....as 5 min of posting now from 15 min earlier..

Oh yeah I didn't really focus on that aspect. Could be on a different section altogether about the window and its effects on trying to time auto votes on authors you already know are popular. Worth mentioning though.

In short, you can certainly do it, but there are two caveats:

  1. You have to time it reliably to be before other voters and trade off with sacrificing curation the earlier you do it. It makes it so you might just find other things that can be more profitable.
  2. Downvotes can limit how much you actually get. If a popular author writes something that isn't that great, than downvotes should go there. I think we are far away from getting to that state though, given there are much, much bigger fish to fry.

It's pretty hard to get time along...even if we set into autovotes, on a particular famous authors , the nu.ber of votes fell on it is lot more and few of them even bigger fish with high upvote value....getting a slice in between them is too hard, and ultimately the whales wins the race in curation too

Yeah I wouldn't count on that game. But here's the thing, there are many curation groups forming. You can get ahead by discovering things and voting ahead and referring them. So I think that's a good option.

Getting into the game is kind of gambling...you may be win with big players or left behind

Votes on famous authors is going to be a very tough competitive game. Should you vote at 5 minutes, or 4m57s or 3m or???

Unless you are really an expert and think you can outcompete the other experts I would stay away from that game entirely.

As stated in the original post, your immediate curation rewards are the same no matter what you vote on, so go try to find less crowded/competitive places to vote.

That a lot make sense, where the number matters. It's not all easy to keep following the big user and get into competition. More user and more high value votes doesn't matter whereas you can good rewards on lower post too

Voter 1482, because it's good info and I don't have enough to stake to worry about curating efficiency.. If I did though this would be valuable personally, but again it's valuable to the ecosystem to I'm supporting the post. That's how deep my thought process goes, do I like this? Is it possibly making steem better? Yes n yes = upvote

That's how I think too, maybe with some small rules of thumb on top. I don't think I'm even close to maximizing rewards.

Anyway, ideally it should get to that point for everyone, where it shouldn't matter.

Very useful information especially now that we're moving towards a curation focused culture in Newsteem

Great to see you posting

@eonwarped thank you for the post it was very insightful 🏆

Thank you for this @eonwarped, it's very, very helpful. And thanks to @bengy for drawing it to our attention in the PHC (formerly @steemitbloggers) Discord

No problem! Let me know if you have other questions

Great post describing many aspects of voting. I hope to get more information regarding timing of upvote from you.

Informative and convincing so resteeming

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