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RE: Why I Advise Against Linear Reward
Superlinear reward encourages some curation as opposed to the current system that incentivizes exclusive self-upvotes. Good or bad can only be determined by the person doing the curation.
It doesn't and if you read the above section of the whitepaper carefully, no such claim is made:
This states a necessary but not sufficient condition. The white paper does not claim that superlinear alone is sufficient to achieve curation, in fact it states precisely the opposite because it explains the need for downvotes to prevent collusion (a somewhat technical term, but in this context, it means more SP working together to increase the payout of content above its merits; somewhat different from the implied English meaning since there is no requirement for multiple actors, only an increased amount of SP working to self-reward).
Unfortunately the white paper got some of this wrong. It describes the crab bucket model where stakeholders are supposed to pull down others who try to collude to extract rewards. However, in the real world, we have seen that most stakeholders would rather see to their own reward earnings rather than 'waste' vote power pulling others down. The psychology may be valid, but the cost of downvoting is just too high for psychology to override economics here.
Crowdsourced downvotes as described by @yabapmatt also distribute rewards in a non-linear fashion, as follows. If 100% upvote and no one downvotes, the reward is 100% relative to the amount of voting power used. If 80% upvote and 20% downvote, the reward is 75% relative to the amount of voting power used. This is non-linear and satisfies the necessary condition of the white paper. This assumes that downvotes don't deplete upvote power as in the @cervantes/@kevonwong/etc. proposal. If they do then the reward is 60%, but either way, still non-linear.
We think that is a better approach. I wouldn't flat out rule out some superlinear (indeed we have one at my urging in HF20 with the new treatment of dust votes at the very low end), but n^2 doesn't look like a good solution and other solutions are underdeveloped (and, quite possibly, unnecessary).
I really appreciate your inputs!
I implied this as it's implied by the whitepaper.
This isn't a binary thing. It's part of some very complex ever-changing dynamics. At some point, the bulk of the stakeholders even agreed to refrain from voting to a large extent forgoing a lot of rewards.
Very interesting solution. I hadn't understood it correctly so I'm very grateful for the way you've described it. My first impression is that it's a solution I could very be in favor of.
We have two and half years of experience across various other tweaks in the reward system to see basically the same result. Stakeholders, by and large, don't want to waste their valuable earning potential on downvotes or not voting (there are always exceptions but they are precisely that).
Yes it was me (along with abit) who organized and promoted that so I'm quite aware of it. Having been there, I can tell you it wasn't sustainable. Even if abit and I were willing to continue doing what we were doing indefinitely, the other major stakeholders were not, and in the place of the largest stakeholders, the next largest were starting to do the same thing.
That sort of crab bucket approach does not work if downvotes are too expensive. Other than that, it could very well work. I've even said that with cheap downvotes n^2 could work. It might produce different results than what many in the community want in terms of reward distribution, but it might be (probably would be) a whole lot better than what we saw with n^2 and no cheap downvotes.
I agree with most of the points you've made and our disagreements aren't fundamental disagreements.
I wanted to state my truth as clear as possible. The selfless are losing some ROI to the selfish in a flawed system.
Selfishness is not a long term successful approach. Since it's not sustainable. The selfless are losing in the short term frame yes. But they can build up stronger relationships that lasts for a life time. In the end the goal is to use Tokens to produce higher leverage by investing in human brains that think big and long term.
This space needs to evolve into digital jobs eventually if you truly want to maximise ROI. At the moment since it's such a new field everyone is just trying to do some blogging with random stuff. More organisation is needed. Niches + Community systems. And moderators that own various Niches would be an interesting experiment. People focusing on niches that they love. Therefore everyone is getting more of what they want.
Thank you for the discussion.
the only get rich here is the bots. that's the reality, just saying
I do not understand how it encourages curation.
If we have nonlinear rewards my upvotes are worthless unless I upvote the most popular content. So it supresses curation even more so, as my voice is suppressed unless I follow the crowd.
Right now my vote as an example is worth $2. I get to give this to anyone I like. Much easier for me to actually curate and reward what I find valuable.
This is what I want to see answered. Superlinear isn't magically going to make curation happen.
i think the assumption is that people will converge into what's valuable... but as the old saying says: beautify is in the eye of the beholder and to apply it to steem...
One man's shitpost is another man's gold..
When you say "people will converge", you mean when things are superlinear? This isn't going to be true, unless you mean to say "a few top whales will converge". And that's the troubling part for me.
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I've long come to grips with the fact that trending was never amazing... it was different because of how young the project was.
Look at whaleshares, look at the amount of rewards being given... early adopters are potentially killing it... and its linear!
watch a year from now people over there complaining about the same things they do here.
Nonlinear rewards can be gamed by dividing your SP up into a bunch of different accounts. you're not going to stop self upvoting. What we really need is account based voting with accounts verified by oracles, which is coming anyway I believe.
Incorrect as pointed out by @smooth.
It may, but my point is that I would prefer to keep the reward algorithm as simple as possible, and allow the community to regulate it from there. So if the community decides that excessive self-upvoting is bad, they can downvote people who do that, which then removes the incentive that is there now.
Flagged rewards are simply returned to the reward pool and as stated in my post those flagged rewards are up for grab by selfish and selfless upvoters alike, leaving selfish upvoters at an advantage.
Not true. Those second round of selfish voters are also more likely to be downvoted. You have to look at this as a large economy, not individual steps. The first downvote of a selfish voter puts the rewards back in the pool but that doesn't mean selfish and selfless voters are on then equal footing. The downvotes can continue to follow selfish voters indefinitely.
The result is likely to be an equilibrium with far less selfish voting, not only because selfish voters get downvoted, returning those rewards to the pool, but because crowdsourced downvotes change the incentives on selfish voting in the first place. It will not be perfect (nohting is) but it will likely be far better, with more for the pool going to value adding activities.
True but under linear reward, the rewards returned would represent a growing % of the reward pool with ever-growing incentive to defect. If downvotes are crowdsourced my statement is irrelevant.
That entire statement makes no sense. The returned rewards represent either the same % of the reward pool (if all returned) or a smaller % (if only a portion are returned). There is no way for it to increase. I have no idea what sort of convoluted reasoning has led you to conclude this.
I've cut corners while explaining my point.
Let's say someone's flag or vote was first worth an infinitesimal part of the reward pool well after the most extreme case imaginable where every single vote is counteracted, well that infinitesimal vote would now control 100% of the pool.
The incentives to defect become greater as more flags are given because flagers become "fewer" or spent and the potential rewards greater.
It's a very convoluted way to make my point and I'm not sure how sound my explanation of it is but hopefully, it's clear enough.
It's good that you are calling me on my half-baked explanation that I had given. I knew when I wrote my answer it wasn't really clear at best and possibly didn't mean much at worst.
Aside from the fact that this situation is contrived and would never happen....you haven't demonstrated anything here. It is just as easy to downvote that vote as all the others, and there is no reason to believe that after all the other votes are counteracted this one wouldn't be too.
You could make a similar argument for non-linear. As votes become more concentrated there is no incentive to vote for anything but the single highest-paid post (even if it is complete and utter garbage/abuse/etc.). Everything else will pay nothing making the vote worthless! It becomes a tyranny of vote-for-the-biggest-or-your-vote-is-worthless.
These extreme cases are not helpful.
Under superlinear, the rewards go disproportionally toward the consensus in the saw way, the flags are disproportionally powerful when cast against the consensus.
Under linear rewards, everyone has, proportionally to their stake, the same incentive to defect (self-vote) as everyone else (except for curation reward), while under superlinear, the biggest shareholders have a disproportional incentive to defect but if too many do, they collapse their own network and Steem net worth. Thus there is an incentive for them to police each other. It is mathematically possible for them to effectively police each other unlike under linear reward.
Under linear everyone has the same incentive to defect and thus no incentive to flag. Expecting more flags to be given when there are no incentives for flags goes against logic.
They're up for grab for the next least selfish self-voters. The most likely contender for countering selfvoting is independent flagging pool along with burning of flagged reward, which I guess due to technical implementation difficulty doesn't have much traction.
Indeed. It's a loophole with serious issues as I've stated.
Leaving the rest for grab for the next least selfish self-voters leaving the same loophole open as I understand it.
"next least selfish" = Not selfish.
Not sure how you understand it otherwise.
It doesn't put potential abusers at a disadvantage.
yes it does
Of course it does. They are more likely to be downvoted. Even if it isn't 100% guaranteed it pushes their incentives toward better (less likely to be downvoted) behavior
Under crowdsourced flags, this isn't so.