Steemit Hardfork 19 ''Equality'' Overview: Linear Rewards, Curation Weight Curve & Increased Vote Impact
Are you ready for a Socio Technological Revolution? Then sign up on Steemit.com, a Social Platform based on an entirely new concept that is making Headlines for rewarding it's users for their Attention and Contribution. Still currently in Beta stage, Steemit has gone through numerous changes with latest Hardfork Codenamed ''Equality'' taking effect as of 22th July 2017. With the new Hardfork implemented, users have noticed that their Voting Power has significantly increased praising Steemit & it's Developers for such changes, as many individuals have voiced their opinion & requested changes to be made to the Rewards and Voting Algorithm
Community Driven Hardfork
There has been several complaints that new User who own little to no Steem Power have an insignificant impact within Steemit's Ecosystem, in order to gain more influence a user must either invest money to purchase Steem Power or earning from Posting, Commenting & Curating. While Hardfork ''Equality'' is a complicated change to Steem's Protocol, users enjoy the simplicity of voting their Steem Witnesses and deciding for themselves whether they are happy with any upcoming changes to be implemented. There are 2 changes within the update that affect non-technical community members, such as the changing to a square root curation rewards curve and increasing vote impact.
Hardfork “Equality” purpose is to make everyone’s influence directly proportional to their stake (as opposed to the existing system in which influence is exponentially related)
Protocol Updates
Linear Rewards
Change the rewards curve to be n from n^2
With the Community requesting a change to the Reward Algorithms, developers decided to go forward with changing all content rewards to a linear reward curve. This had been suggested by multiple people and through research many agreed that this is the best choice to grow Steemit's community by recognizing user feedback
With the introduction of a linear reward curve everyone will have a say directly proportional to their stake
Curation Weight Curve
The curation rewards curve should be changed to a square root function
As with past changes to rewards, there has been changes to the curation reward curve, however it was proposed that the weight curve is now changed to a square root function. Comparisons of curation rewards on existing posts under this new model show a high degree of similarity to current rewards that even slightly favors smaller accounts more than the current weight curve does
However, it has been noted by the Developers that Hardfork 19 changes to the curation rewards curve isn't likely to have a noticeable impact on curation rewards, meaning that Users shouldn't expect to see a significant difference in earning Curation Rewards for Upvoting. This is necessary, simply to prevent the linear reward curve changes from having a material impact on curation rewards
Increased Vote Impact
A 100% vote should use 4x as much voting power as it does today (2% total VP instead of 0.5%)
With the new Hardfork implemented, users find that their ''upvote'' increased in value due to the fact that votes are more concentrated. The intention with the ''Equality'' update is to change the voting power reserve rate to allow Steemit account holders to allocate more of their Voting Power in a single upvote, this results in higher payouts.
Smaller stakeholders now have more influence, even though users have 10 full power votes before it starts losing voting power, but if you scale it back to 25% you could still vote on 40 posts
Keep in mind, that Voting power is primarily based upon how much Steem Power (aka vesting STEEM) an account holds as well as how much voting an account has done recently. The Steem network attempts to approximate your average voting rate such that your voting power on any given post is approximately:
SteemPower / VotesPerDay
Because Steem doesn't know how many votes you will cast in the near future, the VotesPerDay calculation is a moving average. This means each consecutive vote you make will increase your average VotesPerDay. The amount of benefit a vote confers on the authors of a post depends upon how many votes are already cast, because payout is determined by the following calculation: NewPayout = (OldVotes + NewVotes)^n2
Previously, with Hardfork 18 users are limited to using only 1/200th of their remaining voting power in a single vote. This however, has been adjusted to allow users to use up more of their voting power if they choose to do so. Not all of us get to spend our voting power every day, in all situations. Very often, there are just a few things we vote for in a day, knowing there should be a healthy limit to how socially active you should be on a platform like Steemit. Hardfork 19 was not meant to necessarily increase your Influence to allocate more funds from the Reward Pool (a.k.a Vesting Fund) but instead you'll concentrate more of your voting power with single upvote, this is especially useful for those who vote more seldom
The changes to the impact of a 100% vote are more material since a vote will be 4 times more powerful with Hardfork 19. Since with Hardfork 18, a single 100% vote uses only 0.5% of your remaining voting power (voting power regenerates fully over a 5 day period). The means, previously on Hardfork 18 , a person would need to vote 40 times a day at full power to use most of their voting power. In order to do what is also now known as ''Social Mining'', it requires you to be constantly active or else you'll will be unable to fully leverage their voting power.
Users should know that voting power automatically refill itself over time that's by Design, once an account has depleted their voting power to zero, it would take estimate 5 days to refill it to 100% linearly, basically 20% per day
For those new to Steemit, when signing up for free account you'll be given 10$ dollar worth of Steem Power. Previously, when you upvote Content it would be worth 0.00$ however with the recent Hardfork it appears users are able to gain 0.02$ value upvote. There is seems to be a misunderstanding that the sudden increase in voting impact is the direct result of the Hardfork, Steemit holders should actually get the idea that they have significantly increased the opportunity to upvote Posts & Comments with more of their voting power with one given Upvote
Once a user reaches a certain amount of Steem Power, they will able to concentrate their voting stake with fewer votes while still being able to spread it out if they choose to.
Users can continue to simply upvote-at-will because a vote only consumes a percentage of the remaining voting power, not the total. Imagine “voting power” as a swimming pool that is constantly being refilled by the rain. Every time you upvote you reduce the amount of water (in this case “voting power”) from the pool by a percentage (i.e. it’s not like you are constantly removing 500 gallons from the lake). The next time you vote you are removing another percentage from an already diminished supply.
That means there are still no limits on how much you can vote. The more you vote the more you incrementally decrease the amount of voting power you have (the water in the pool). To get a better sense of how powerful your votes are and the rate at which that power diminishes simply observe how much your full power upvotes increase the rewards of content creators and you should get an intuitive sense of how the algorithm works.
Beta Stage
If it turns out this is too much, developers can lower the default vote weight on Steemit.com to compensate and bring votes back to how they where they at Hardfork 18. There is always the possibility of being able to revert the change in a later hardfork, with less than 1million user on this platform there is still a lot of time for Steemit to make improvement without effecting to many users. Remember that Steem Witnesses decide whether there should be a new Hardfork, using voting based system we decide who to elect as our representative and duty of Steem Witnesses to do what's best for Steemit Interests
I'm not one of the so called ''Whales'' (Someone with A lot of Steem Power) but voting impact has definitely raise eyebrows for me. Being able to adjust that value, enabling me to spread my votes and the resulting rewards over more posts. There are a lot of Post right now being published by users because Steemit has yet to grow a much greater userbase, with so much content you notice many poorly written post but many that also have many with images, videos or external links. Steemit is being the economic power house that features all these Content and with the recent changes with Hardfork, it makes more sense upvote authorthat put some effort into their post. However being to adjust my voting power, I can always give funny posts or interesting links a small upvote at least while knowing that reward someone significiantly more based on solely my decision to do so
Nice post man very informative for those who don't have the concept down. We are still "experimenting" and time will tell what the results will be. If people know they can slide the power down there may be more interaction/large number of votes to keep the community live and well.
@steemitguide resteemed and followed.. I mean how could I not? that was hella comprehensive thanks!
Appreciate it! Likewise here
Thank-you for the "Steemit Hardfork 19 ''Equality'' Overview". It facilitated a better understanding of the new changes instituted this past week. When it first began, I made a lot of mistakes in the way I voted and had to learn the hard way how to better use my vote. It was a good lesson for me. Your guide is much appreciated and all the extensive and hard work you put into this guide should be commended. Thank-you very much for helping us have a better understanding of Steemit Hardfork 19!
Appreciate this Positive Feedback, glad to help out!
Thanks for the info! Its important to know how all this stuff works and most people don't hahaha
Upvoted and followed
thank you @steemitguide its so informative post i couln't resist to resteem it so i can shear it with all my followers and they can benifit from it the most and espically the new users on the steemit..
And @steemitguide u being a big whale plz upvote my post so i can also get a major benifit from @steemit
Not a Whale my Friend, you have to hustle hard on Steemit! Keep on Posting
Thanks for this post.
You explain me very vell this hardfork :)
Super article, definitely worth the read and bookmark. Thank you!
Thanks for this post been trying to find out more about the system mechanics after Hard Fork 19.
I think it would be better if the rewards system was more progressive - like tax systems - but those with the least power would get a bigger share of the reward and those with the most power would get a smaller share of the reward.
This would balance the playing field a lot better.
Where do the discussions about these things take things?
Head right over to Steemit.chat, there are plenty of Channels to have a discussion about Steemit!
Thank You