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RE: Self voting will now NOT be default steemit.com behaviour

in #steemdev7 years ago (edited)

I've resteemed this for exposure. I don't know if I like it or dislike it yet.

I think the idea is good, but the possible workarounds are endless, which could penalize small new users who are trying to buy STEEM to power their accounts so they upvote their own posts and get noticed.

In order for this to work these same new users will have to be using the promoted feed instead, and the various whale upvote services. (Or spend a long time getting a following through commenting, etc).

I don't know. I'm on the fence.

By the way, there was an extensive commentary on this subject on an old blog post I wrote 14 days ago. I'm not spamming the link... (it already received its payout)

Look through the 127 comments on this exact same subject about how people feel.

https://steemit.com/steemit/@intelliguy/to-vote-yourself-up-or-not-to-vote-yourself-up-that-s-the-question

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Self-voting and clique-voting (aka circle jerks) can never be wholly eliminated, but rules can be put in place to make it less effective compared to the overall aim of max social utility - assuming that is the primary objective and Steem price is the manifestation of that objective.

It seems silly but I think there actually is some disagreement on that assumption, that the aspect to maximize is social utility. I think for some people the investment (or rather return on it) aspect is the most important.

Perhaps this should be the topic of another post, it's coming up a lot.

mmm... a post on the philosophy of monetised social communities - not so different to a big city. I could write it.

There is room for multiple strategies - we are not bots, I assume - but the underlying algos must promote the "common wealth". If there are only the vote-miners then earnings as a percentage will drop until such "income" reaches an equilibrium which may still be good but no longer great.

What then is the role of newbies?

The common wealth!? Socialist! It's that misunderstanding that would be good to unpack because it's what many people hear when you talk about social good here. Add to that the idea that a change in the rule set is more regulation and you're well on your way to a comparison with Marx.

What then is the role of newbies?

This might be the touchstone of the rebuke.

Less politics and more analysis would be useful.

The common wealth is a term used by Francis Bacon, philosopher of science and advocate that science and technology should improve the lives of everyone. Technology is thus a wealth multiplier not a redistributor.

The Steem White Paper is not crystal clear as to the ultimate metric of success; as a startup it talks a lot about the number of users, but can that be a valid metric: to maximise users?

Steem's purposeful realignment of economic incentives has the potential to produce fairer and more inclusive results for everyone involved than the social media and cryptocurrency platforms that have gone before it. This paper will explore the existing economic incentives and demonstrate how Steem's incentives may result in better outcomes for most participants. {my italics}

That's as close as we get to a "maximal social utility". We may call this whatever we want but what it amounts to is the total wealth within Steem. So it may make it easier to drop the economics jargon and call it essentially "maximal market cap of Steem and SBD". Possibly more useful is "total market cap per member". For highly skewed distributions such as Steem wealth, a median of earnings is a better measure.

The White Paper also mentions the Prisoner's Dilemma but, I think, makes an error here:

The naive voting process {meaning the proportional N reward curve now implemented} creates a Prisoner's Dilemma whereby each individual voter has incentive to vote for themselves at the expense of the larger community goal. If every voter defects by voting for themselves then no currency will end up distributed and the currency as a whole will fail to gain network effect. On the other hand, if only one voter defects then that voter would win undeserved profits while having minimal effect on the overall value of the currency.

The current problems were foreseen but the algorithm was not created to mitigate them. Indeed, the subsequent paragraphs are used to justify the N-squared rewards curve, now changed to proportional N.

Looking at this more closely there is a hidden variable that should be changed: rshares or vests. Changing that formula will allow us to return to more votes per day.

Well put, thank you for that.

I posit that in fact, this default is damaging to new accounts in the light of the greatly accelerated rate of vote power decay. They can't then send votes to other accounts to build up their fanbase, and that's the 100% most important factor in growing an account, I have proven it once with my @l0k1 account, making at least 15000SP over 6 months of networking and engagement, and I plan to prove it again with this new account, it will only take a couple of months to see that my strategy is the most effective.

BTW, don't confuse resteeming and linkdropping in a relevant discussion with self-voting. These two ways of promoting yourself do not take away rewards from the pool nor do they (usually) conflict with the keeping of discussions on topic.

Thanks for the link, I will check it out.

I'm not sure the new users argument has any weight. A minnow self voting their own post will have minimal effect. The best way to get noticed is to comment on other people's posts.

But the worksarounds, sure they are a problem too. I'm thinking more about it now and will have more to say on it soon, it's the best hole in the plan 😉

  • Minnow makes new account. Worth under $50 SP

  • Minnow makes comments, makes a post, gets unnoticed since he doesn't have a lot of followers.

  • Minnow buys $2500 worth of STEEM and powers up his account.

  • Minnow creates new post, and votes up himself. While looking under the "new" feed, people notice this post is already voted well above 25 cents and wonder why. They read the post, and upvote it too.

When this happens, it encourages those tho can afford it to buy STEEM to power up. We want that..

Do you really look first at the reward on a post to decide whether to click?

Sometimes... sometimes no. I know a lot of people and bots do. If something is new, is already getting votes, chances are its curation is going to be worth spending vote power on insteads of a dead post that gains no traction.

I personally like good content. I notice a large number of curators gravitate towards posts that are already earning something.

I am sitting on some 90% voting power on my @l0k1 account, and I just realised I often evaluate my decision to upvote on the reverse criteria... If it's already making lots, I look for ones that are good and neglected.

Funny enough curators would earn more money that way, but in reality everyone goes for the trending ones and make fractions of the rewards, take away rewards from neglected authors and over-reward trending content in the process.

It's a mess currently :)

It certainly is. I have suggested the idea of increasing the curator share as a positive incentive against self voting, from 25 to 33%, an increase of 75%, by the way.

I just wrote a proposal in my latest article Curation problems (incentive, rewards and self-voting) to increase the incentive for curators and reduce or even eliminate self-voting.

I would even go as far as to distribute 10% to authors and 90% to curators.

Interesting narrative, I hadn't thought of that. Here's the clincher:

[...] people notice this post is already voted well above 25 cents and wonder why.

The hypothesis here is that post which are already highly valued are of greater interest. I think this could be correct but perhaps not.

In any case the bot (as it currently is configured) is only interested in comments. That's what I tried to say in the post, that I think there is broad agreement that high self vote payouts for comments is not beneficial to the platform.