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RE: HF21: SPS and EIP Explained
"Even a symbolic 1 or 2 % would have gone a long way to showing that we are all in this together."
Great point!
"Even a symbolic 1 or 2 % would have gone a long way to showing that we are all in this together."
Great point!
1% would be a 10% reduction, and 2% would be a 20% reduction. Would these be catastrophic? Perhaps not, but when the current level of witness rewards were set (as part of a previous hard fork which already cut them by 80%), that was done with a goal of maintaining a safety margin in case of realistic but pessimistic scenarios on the Steem price and operational costs. 10% or 20% reduction would be a big hit to that safety margin.
Given:
many witnesses and stakeholders, myself included, view the proposed split as the best tradeoff, despite what may seem like "unfairness" when viewed solely from the perspective of this group vs that group. Sometimes perceived "fairness" can and should take a back seat to function and good economics, particularly when you are talking about an arguably failing project which if it continues on its current trajectory is likely going to ultimately result in no one getting anything.
Finally, it may be a hard truth to hear, especially for community members and content creators such as yourself or @meesterboom who absolutely have contributed a lot, but the content reward pool by design is supposed to be an engine which drives Steem's growth, not only with literal "content" but by attracting and retaining a growing community of people who contribute meaningfully to Steem. Sure there are some who do this, but as an overall mechanism, it clearly hasn't worked and on that basis alone is a prime candidate for having a slice of its budget reallocated to better use (or at least different use with the potential for more value add).
Witnesses, by design, are supposed to securely and honestly sign blocks to maintain the integrity of the network, securely and honestly adjust blockchain parameters, and approve hard forks (which in practice includes some consultation with developers on what is included in hard fork proposals). That portion of the system has generally worked, including at low Steem prices, and most if not all of the current witnesses are doing these things well (this hasn't always been the case).
The bottom line is that witnesses are mostly (if not all) doing their job; the content reward pool has not been doing its job. Looking at this from the perspective of what is best for Steem as a whole, the reasons for the proposed adjustment to the budget ought to be pretty clear.
Different adjustments can be made in the future with the benefit of further experience.
Might I suggest we incorporate the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition to our HardFork21 code?
Thanks for taking the time to reply. Your arguments are valid and well expressed.
Honestly my biggger concern is the new voting curve which I think will severely damage my ability to reward commentors on my posts. I've spent most of my 3 years here trying to encourage engagement and incentivising real human activity.
Will changing the reward curve destroy other business models? If the problem is bots aren't there other coding solutions? If the problem is self voting are there not coding solutions to limit that activity?
I've read of others delegating their Steem Power, buying stake in Palnet and moving their activities there.
I'm keeping my eyes open, trying to learn and staying ready to make the needed moves.
The curve is an interesting question for sure. I personally believe there needs to be some curve, but not necessarily this exact one. The Steemit devs have studied things carefully and have their own presumably good reasons for proposing this particular curve. I'm pretty open minded on this particular aspect of it and will be looking to engage with both Steemit devs and the community on the matter going forward.
Not directly, since people can always move stake to different accounts, and generally tiny payouts are a huge burden on people trying to catch milkers/self-voters (who aren't always literally voting for the same account but may be voting for accounts of other friends/collaborators or sock puppets).
I'm sure your own efforts are well-indented and may well contribute a lot of value, but apart from AI (if even then) there is no way for a computer algorithm to tell the difference between your tiny votes and someone working with some friends/sock puppets to milk the pool to death by a thousand cuts, so we need to put some sort of speed bump in there.
Thanks for the raising the issue.
Thanks to you. Seems like a plunge into murky waters. I was wondering if each Dapp couldn't have their own reward algorithms similar to what Palnet.io has done.
That is one way things can work. Individual apps can have their own tokens, algorithms, and eligibility policies. For example they can easily ban anyone they want, which is one way to address some of these problems but is also much harder to do at the core level of a public blockchain.
Well, and that's the big problem. The biggest positives in the communities I'm in is that personal engagement: People reading, responding, and voting on things in comment sections they like. That's the way in which steem most resembles social media. This change is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I'm told there are tremendous abuses of the rewards pool going on. Undoubtedly this is true. But this change has too large of an impact on the best of steem's ecosystem. This change must be struck down. I'm doing everything I can to get the witness votes needed for a different top 20, but it certainly feels like there's a wall of rich people making the decisions for us. I've invested what I can afford into steem. They happen to be richer. That doesn't make it right. They're pulling the rug out from underneath all the target demographic. You want to attract the masses? Make Steem attractive for the masses. Not for the Steem whales. Their incentive to behave well should be that they want the value of steem to go up, because they already have a lot. Changing the system so that they can acquire more steem is not going to make them behave better. They'll just have more power to come out on top while the rest of steem sinks.
Trickle down economics doesn't work. It's been demonstrated time and again that it only leads to greater wealth disparity and an overall lower standard of living. This is that.
Yes yes yes!
interestingly, in case steem price would go up to lets say 10$, all the top witnesses become multi millionaires with high monthly income that should be the incentive for any witness to be ok with some lower $ value monthly income for the work today with the low steem price. as mentioned by some others, it would been the best if everybody would have contributed to pay for SPS.
There were discussions about this. Some were in favour (most noticebly @thecryptodrive), but the majority was against it; including myself.
I can only speak for myself, but the reasoning was quite logical. The SPS is very similar to the reward-pool. It's just more fine-tuned on achieving results, instead of just having a playground for people to co-operate. So taking the cut from the reward-pool makes sense.
In contrast, witnesses are the backbone of Steem and its ecosystem; which includes Steem Engine & co. Taking from that source would possibly mean pulling the rug from underneath.
Witnesses in the TOP 20 are making roughly 9280 STEEM per month; backup-witnesses are making far less (roughly 1/4 or lower). 9280 STEEM at 0.4 USD is ~3712$. (Brutto; tax has to be subtracted) Infrastructure is roughly 400$-1000$ (or more); depending on factors like full-nodes, hivemind-nodes, etc. But this only includes hardware costs, not the costs associated with the individual(s) behind the witness. Besides the obvious requirements as in securing & monitoring nodes and reviewing code, there are many unspoken requirements from witnesses; taking part in discussions, answering questions, helping new/old members, etc etc.
Now imagine BTC would drop to 3000$ and STEEM were to stay at its current level; this would result in a 12 cent STEEM. 9280 STEEM would suddenly only be worth ~1110$ (Brutto). At that point, maintaining a witness would still be possible, but a far bigger risk-factor, as the costs of running Steem nodes are essentially only rising (MIRA is helping, but TOP 20-30 witnesses do have to run high memory nodes in order to keep replay-duration low).
Especially, as infrastructure costs are really just the fundament. And you want to have experienced witnesses that feel their time is valued, which includes adequate payment.
I'm obviously not arguing with you that a 1% cut wouldn't really matter in the great scheme of things, but then why even bother with doing that, when the logical thing to do is to reduce the reward-pool in favour for the SPS pool (as I explained above).
Just because people would have a better feeling, as in we're all in this together? That's just sugar on top. Because what if I told you, that we're already in this together?
I'm a witness and developer for sure, but I'm also a content creator. Over my 2 years here on Steem, I've produced 283 posts. That's probably not as much as really dedicated content creators, but its still something. So yeah, the reward-pool cut also effects me directly.
I appreciate your thorough reply and the work that you do as a witness.
I understand your projections of a stagnant price or a lower price for Steem. On the other hand all of this is being done with the hope of increasing the price.
I also believe that witnesses have the best chance of benefiting financially from SPS since many are building as witnesses they can also make proposals and get paid even more with SPS.
In actual fact my bigger concern is the voting curve. I've invested a lot of money in Steempower and I'm very concerned that my vote for commentors on my blog will be negated.
I don't buy votes but I do give my own posts a 100% upvote. Keep in mind that on most of my posts I give away between 5 and 10 Steem in prizes. I feel that my business model will be destroyed. Maybe I'm wrong and time will tell.
For the first time in 3 years I'm powering down in order to be flexible enough to make drastic moves if necessary.
One last thing. Too many changes all at once. The last time it was an awful hardfork, not smooth at all.
Thanks for mentioning me as a proponent to taking from the witness pool. I have been heavily negotiating for witnesses to shed 1% as you know. I do believe strongly in securing the chain but I also feel that 1% is not that much and the public relations between witnesses and the community benefits would be far greater. If we don’t it just creates an us vs them scenario and breeds witness conspiracy theories.
I don’t understand one thing, you say that if BTC drops to 3000, Steem drops to 12 cents, but when BTС grows by 2-3 times, from 5000 to 14000, Steem does not grow, it remains at the level of 30-40 cents. It looks like a game with only one goal. Why it happens?
Why not take from witness rewards and make the remaining witness rewards a proposal in the SPS system?
Why not do so with the whole rewards pool?
That was exactly my thought in the original SPS discussion.
Another alternative is that SPS proposals, if approved, can be paid directly out the same reward pool that currently pays posts and comments (making the observation that both a "proposal" and a "comment or post" are fundamentally the very same thing: making a transaction to the blockchain that says: "Please vote to pay me").
I think in both cases this is premature if only because the existing implemented, tested and ready-to-deploy code does not work that way, but also because I'm pretty sure people want more confidence in seeing SPS do something useful before more tightly integrating it into Steem. (Those with experience seeing a nearly-identical system work on Bitshares may be more confident, but not all of us have that experience.)
I know, and I hated it 🙂 ... But the more I look at the what seems like failure of the rewards pool to reward valuable contributions while the inflation pulls the price down, I’m wondering if it’s the road we are heading down.
The only way that would ever work though is if we had a front end that was good enough on it’s own to actually attract people, engage them and make them want to stay or perhaps a separate reward mechanism (Content token?).
As a social media platform we are lacking a way to encourage people to enjoy and engage and so it’s now just all about rewards. As silly as it may sound - emojis, “claps” or other “expressions”, ways that make it easy to find content and other users with same interests, resteems with ability to add comment etc would make it actually fun to interact on the platform... and maybe there wouldn’t be as much focus on an upvote.
I also agree that the SPS has to prove itself before additional funding is considered, as we really have no idea what to expect at this point.
Agree with you about emojis, etc. Also the UI is very clunky, and between that and RC costs, it discourages casual interaction and humor in the sort of way that drives reddit, twitter, etc. It needs a serious re-imagining, like maybe comments are removed from being payout items and are just comments (which would make them much cheaper). As well as emojis, etc. of course.
As for the dynamic split between SPS and the rest of the pool, I'm not sure why you hate it. Stakeholders would vote on the split one way or another, and if stakeholders aren't sold on the existing reward pool mechanism pulling its weight, sooner or later it is going to get drastically reallocated or even zeroed out by hard fork. You can't stop stakeholders from doing that, and the economics of it may become too compelling for it to not happen (if Steem doesn't die first). Giving those same stakeholders a direct vote on the matter doesn't seem all that different to me.
Yes I understand that stakeholders are already essentially deciding where the rewards pool goes, as they should, and if things continue a change will most likely come.
My concern was directing it all to a system when we have no idea what it will look like. A system that will rely on participation, through voting, to ensure the decisions are made. When it’s in the code it’s hands off in a way. If it was directed through the SPS it seems like it would require stake holders to be more actively involved is all... and I question whether they will maybe? Maybe that’s not a logical concern.
Ultimately my distaste for the idea was that I think we need to see how the SPS works, how stakeholders respond etc before taking such a step.
Fair enough, but I believe (could be mistaken) that at the time I even said that it shouldn't be done now but if at all in some future iteration. So I guess we are in violent agreement.
This idea that comments should be removed from the payout pool entirely is interesting. Right now, because I can reward comments like posts, I want to. I want people to interact with me, and I like when they do, and when I see a comment I like, I want to upvote it.
But if all comments were simply "decline reward" I can imagine two feasible workaround scenarios. One, there would certainly be a bot developed that you give posting permission to, and when you "liked" a comment, it would go to the user's most recent post that hadn't paid out yet and deliver your vote value there, while letting you leave the $ emoji on the comment (or whatever)
Or two, people would just stop thinking of comments as posts. It would take away valuable functionality, I think, but this EIP is already taking away most of the valuable functionality of steem as a crypto-rewards social media site, so why not that, too?
Idea three would be that if you want to reward comments and interaction, you pay them a tip either directly (as Steem has very cheap on-chain transfers, in fact fundamentally they really ought to be cheaper than votes, although I'm not sure this is currently the case) or via a tip bot, which already happens on other social platforms.
You should submit those feature requests on https://github.com/steemit/condenser/issues
There is a little handful of devs from the community, including me, who are working on fixing bugs, adding features to Steemit (see my recent posts).
Features that requires more effort could be funded by SPS in the future.
Why the do so with the wowl rewards pool?
I am a bot. I turn comments into owl related puns.
Interesting!
Totally, just even 1!!
@meesterboom I’m one of the few to offer to sacrifice from the witness funding to show solidarity, another very few agreed with me, I’m still pushing that agenda as you can see on my forum post https://neosteem.com/topics/thecryptodrive/tokenbb-topic-sps-inflation-funding-split-prop-1560906423422 sadly you unvoted my witness (even though im fighting for creators like you) because I got into some heated discussion with a friend of yours and said one thing to offend him whereas in the rest he was way more abusive to me.
I am glad you are still pushing that agenda, it is a credit to you.
The issue of unvoting you as a witness is a separate issue to this one.
It’s to do with the other guy who swore and slandered me way worse than the misinformed observation I voiced :)
I hold my witnesses to a high standard though.
:0D
“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” - you never been in an argument before? You don’t think other witnesses havent? If your standards are so high why do u vote NGC, he intimidates and abuses countless ppl on the platform including women, threatened to rape one of my team members even a while back.
Lol. I don't claim to be without sin. I have engaged in far worse arguments and swearing on here.
But it's my vote. And I can do with it as I please.
Ps. I don't condone his every action but I quite like NGC.
Wow ok your standards apply different to different people and apparently by my saying to someone that if they stopped voting their commenters they may not stick around is worse than someone who threatens to rape a woman on this platform. I don’t understand your standards, I thought u were quite cool for a long time.
For the record:
https://steemit.com/steem/@nonameslefttouse/pth3gv
Hey back to what you were saying about marketing, I believe most of all the new Worker proposal projects will be MARKETINg based. I believe 1% of the steem inflation put into marketing could increase steem user base and price back to all time highs or at least $2-$4 range :D