You are wrong. Investing in human Trust and Relationships gives the best ROI. A person doing self-upvotes is never going to get the same Leverage and Return as the person investing into other humans. You can scale stuff when you invest in other humans. As you get access to more energy. You can not scale it by investing all into yourself. Coca-Cola spends 3 billion dollars per year in advertising. That is leverage. Same as best ROI leverage always will be invest in people with potential for growth.
I can't figure out when it would ever apply, at first thought. In a 100% curation system, the author gets nothing. So you could vote on any content you wanted and you would get the same reward, completely independent of whether it was your content or someone else's.
In such a system, there wouldn't even be additional direct rewards to be gained by making people think your content was "good" by upvoting it yourself, since if they did then vote for it, you wouldn't get any reward from their vote.
About the only think I could come up with is some indirect benefit of increased fame, but it's questionable how much "positive fame" you would get unless your content was actually good.
You're right it wouldn't make any difference for who people vote so my statement was only partially correct. 100% to curation is an extreme that doesn't make any sense. It was part of what I was pointing at. Again, I appreciate your opinion and I wish more top witnesses would have joined.
It's definitely an extreme case, and not one to explore right now, IMO, but it has been proposed before as an alternative to the current system and it "could" make sense.
In such a system, the blockchain pays rewards to good curators (i.e. investors) and authors only benefit indirectly (via recognition, advertising, etc).
It's not as crazy as it might sound at first: plenty of people write all the time now without expecting direct monetary rewards from what they write.
All that aside, I'm definitely not in favor of trying something like that on Steem.
I'm failing to see how the system can work without some sort of superlinear. (in reward to post reward as opposed to curation reward). Now, Steem is far from simple system and it's hard to foresee all possibilities.
Also, I didn't realize 100% curation shouldn't be ruled out outright so thanks for enlarging my horizons in that regard.
There is superlinearity in curation rewards now, it's just not based on stake. Essentially, the superlinearity is based off being the first to spot good content before others find it and vote on it. The early voters get more than the later voters. The idea is that this will encourage a curator to find the content that other people will vote on.
But this is often misunderstood right now: many voters think they get more for voting for a post that already has a lot of votes on it, when such votes actually get much less of the overall curation reward.
Most importantly, under 25% rewards split among all curators versus 75% going to the one author, this superlinearity is pretty much moot because the rewards are just so small relative to author rewards that the economics are totally skewed to self-voting.
The most important thing to do now is to change this percentage to allow for meaningful curation rewards. Then we can consider tinkering without how those curation rewards are apportioned after they become numbers that matter.
But even under 50% curation or even 75% curation wouldn't the big whale simply look to vote for themselves? Wouldn't exclusive self upvote be the surest strategy for best ROI for most of the large whales?
Correct, the highest voting return is to sell your vote because you get the curation value of the vote + money on top of it. Self voting isn't as good, which is why some of the most flagrant self voters moved over to bidbots and got a better return there.
I don't think changing curation rules or amounts will change much. The only real option is community led downvotes of socially and arbitrarily deemed undesirable content.
Changing the curation/author mix reduces the heavy lifting that downvotes have to do. It takes less downvoting to push self-voting or vote-selling down to 50% than to 25%. There could also likely be more collateral damage with the latter. That said, downvotes alone without changing the split may still work. The question comes down to: 1) degree of relying on altruism since they are still not incentivized, 2) effect of remaining downvote discouragements such as retaliation or social reputation, 3) if the free downvote power is smaller than the upvote power there may not be enough to perform more heavy lifting.
Best of all is to sell to your vote to someone before the mega bid-bots upvote. You get paid for the vote as well as frontrun for extra curation. You also don't need to have your SP tied up in a bid-bot.
You are wrong. Investing in human Trust and Relationships gives the best ROI. A person doing self-upvotes is never going to get the same Leverage and Return as the person investing into other humans. You can scale stuff when you invest in other humans. As you get access to more energy. You can not scale it by investing all into yourself. Coca-Cola spends 3 billion dollars per year in advertising. That is leverage. Same as best ROI leverage always will be invest in people with potential for growth.
This could change through oracles though?
Possibly.
What? That makes no sense at all to me. Maybe you could explain further.
You're right. My statement doesn't necessarily apply 100% of the time.
I can't figure out when it would ever apply, at first thought. In a 100% curation system, the author gets nothing. So you could vote on any content you wanted and you would get the same reward, completely independent of whether it was your content or someone else's.
In such a system, there wouldn't even be additional direct rewards to be gained by making people think your content was "good" by upvoting it yourself, since if they did then vote for it, you wouldn't get any reward from their vote.
About the only think I could come up with is some indirect benefit of increased fame, but it's questionable how much "positive fame" you would get unless your content was actually good.
You're right it wouldn't make any difference for who people vote so my statement was only partially correct. 100% to curation is an extreme that doesn't make any sense. It was part of what I was pointing at. Again, I appreciate your opinion and I wish more top witnesses would have joined.
It's definitely an extreme case, and not one to explore right now, IMO, but it has been proposed before as an alternative to the current system and it "could" make sense.
In such a system, the blockchain pays rewards to good curators (i.e. investors) and authors only benefit indirectly (via recognition, advertising, etc).
It's not as crazy as it might sound at first: plenty of people write all the time now without expecting direct monetary rewards from what they write.
All that aside, I'm definitely not in favor of trying something like that on Steem.
I'm failing to see how the system can work without some sort of superlinear. (in reward to post reward as opposed to curation reward). Now, Steem is far from simple system and it's hard to foresee all possibilities.
Also, I didn't realize 100% curation shouldn't be ruled out outright so thanks for enlarging my horizons in that regard.
There is superlinearity in curation rewards now, it's just not based on stake. Essentially, the superlinearity is based off being the first to spot good content before others find it and vote on it. The early voters get more than the later voters. The idea is that this will encourage a curator to find the content that other people will vote on.
But this is often misunderstood right now: many voters think they get more for voting for a post that already has a lot of votes on it, when such votes actually get much less of the overall curation reward.
Most importantly, under 25% rewards split among all curators versus 75% going to the one author, this superlinearity is pretty much moot because the rewards are just so small relative to author rewards that the economics are totally skewed to self-voting.
The most important thing to do now is to change this percentage to allow for meaningful curation rewards. Then we can consider tinkering without how those curation rewards are apportioned after they become numbers that matter.
But even under 50% curation or even 75% curation wouldn't the big whale simply look to vote for themselves? Wouldn't exclusive self upvote be the surest strategy for best ROI for most of the large whales?
Actually not, at that point it doesn't matter what you vote on, you get the same rewards. It comes down to pay-to-vote.
Correct, the highest voting return is to sell your vote because you get the curation value of the vote + money on top of it. Self voting isn't as good, which is why some of the most flagrant self voters moved over to bidbots and got a better return there.
I don't think changing curation rules or amounts will change much. The only real option is community led downvotes of socially and arbitrarily deemed undesirable content.
Changing the curation/author mix reduces the heavy lifting that downvotes have to do. It takes less downvoting to push self-voting or vote-selling down to 50% than to 25%. There could also likely be more collateral damage with the latter. That said, downvotes alone without changing the split may still work. The question comes down to: 1) degree of relying on altruism since they are still not incentivized, 2) effect of remaining downvote discouragements such as retaliation or social reputation, 3) if the free downvote power is smaller than the upvote power there may not be enough to perform more heavy lifting.
Still, it could work.
Best of all is to sell to your vote to someone before the mega bid-bots upvote. You get paid for the vote as well as frontrun for extra curation. You also don't need to have your SP tied up in a bid-bot.
This might be the reason why I get 200 upvotes before I use the bid bots !
That could be part of the reason. Resteem services also dish out 300 worthless votes for 1 or 2 SBD.
I agree. I had to read @aggroed's comment to understand yours.