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RE: Hardfork 20 (“Velocity”) development update
The 30-minute curation window does nothing to stop bots.
The bots just make sure to jump in right at the 30-minute mark.
Changing the window to 15 minutes will not eliminate this problem. The window should be discarded entirely.
And redistributing the curation rewards that happen in said 15-minute window will penalize the average Steemian who makes sure to check their "Upvote Post" checkbox whenever they compose a new post.
Bad form, gentlemen.
15min is clearly more reasonable than 30min so humans can compete better with bots. It was discussed and many were of your opinion but it was easier to just change a parameter and has less risk of unintended consequences.
Even if it was to take 30min to read an article it usually doesn't take more than 15min to get a good feel of the value of a post.
Also given 10 votes a day as optimal voting frequency it's less likely anyone would actually spend 5 hours a day (30min*10) reviewing content than 2.5h.
I agree with you that the rule is not helpful and should be even shorter or removed altogether. However, there isn't consensus including the stakeholders and dev team to do that. While the reduction to 15 minutes isn't my ideal choice here, I do feel it is a clear improvement.
While you are right it does little about bots other than cause them to make a small recalibration, it does penalize humans less, even when voting before 15 minutes. For example, under the 30 minute rule, voting after 10 minutes would reduce curation rewards by 66% while now it will only reduce them by 33%,
This window is not an ideal solution by any means.
But we have no better option still.
I disagree. The window allows more fair play. I could make a bot that votes all posts of successful authors in the first second. Or i could build a bot that makes a tradeoff between voting early or late and the incentive is already not there anymore.
And the self vote change means that the author can't take curation rewards into his own pocket, a change that will hurt mostly whales. And honestly, you should never expect to get that 25% curation as an author in the first place.
You can't because there are more than 10 successful authors posting daily, and besides you will be competing with other bots for a share (likely small) of those authors if you're all voting on the same ones. It rapidly becomes diminshishing returns and a waste of your vote power.
That's exactly what happens now under the 30 minute (or 15 minute rule). Bots are able to time things exactly and make calculated vote timing, while humans are disadvantaged unless they stare at a clock and act like a bot.
What I wanted to say was: The issue shifts from speed (be the first) to math (have the best formula) and for me personally, making a fast bot is easy, deriving a formula is not that easy.
Sure it still is gameable, but not as much. I agree wtih you that the window is not great, but unless we have a better alternative, is it better than no window in my opinion.
Currently Steemvoter is way out with its auto-votes due to congestion and 'peak times'.
I can see this becoming worse(better) with this change and throwing the advantage back to the human who is willing to sit and wait for 15 minutes to tick over.
Mass bots like steemvoter will always be behind the fast self coded ones. So you will have a few with fast bots frontrunning steemvoter.
Thanks for the clarification here. This may be of interest to whales who source their main income from curation.
What if after 30 min window the post was already heavy upvoted and the curation reward for the bot will be minimal? That's the whole idea, without the 15 min windows bots will just upvote in the first second. Than the curation rewards for humans will be very low. We want the opposite.
Exactly!
What we want is curation rewards for actual, significant curation to be higher. Camping for the top posters and waiting to vote (whether after 5-10 minutes or immediately) is not the quality curation that we want to reward humans for doing. I'm perfectly happy letting bots get that (relatively small) portion of the pool and letting humans go elsewhere to curate harder-to-find content.
This situation was very different in the early days with less content, fewer voters, and n^2 rewards. In that environment, the vast majority of the rewards (both posting and curation) went to just a tiny handful of posts from a tiny handful of authors. That's no longer the case.
I understand but without the window the bots can instantly upvote everything with small vote power.
The bots come in anywhere from 15-30 from what I see on my posts.
I suspect many will opt now to change this down to 15 minutes. Hopefully this will increase congestion even further and the manual voter will win.