#steem

Improving the Economics of Steem: A Community Proposal

improving economcs.jpg

Hello Steemians, today we would like to disclose our public support for a proposal that we believe would improve the economic incentives built into Steem. The Steemit team recently met to discuss this issue. We agreed on the nature of the problem, and more or less agreed with the proposal presented by the Steem user @trafalgar which we will refer to as the “Economic Improvement Proposal” or “EIP.”

Improving Content Discovery

The problems that we believe should be solved are that of self-voting, passive delegation to bidbots (instead of participation in content discovery), spam (especially microspam), and abuse. These problems undermine one of the core unique value propositions of the platform; proof-of-brain. People generally gravitate towards what is the most profitable thing for them to do when there is monetary incentive.

The goal of these economic changes would be to move Steem closer to delivering on the promises stated in the whitepaper of unearthing high quality content by making it more profitable for people to actively curate, and less profitable to self-vote and delegate one’s Steem Power to bid bots.

Our Focus

Right now our focus remains 100% on improving steemit.com, Communities, MIRA, finalizing the Steem Proposal System Hardfork (HF21 or the “SteemDAO”), and preparing to switch to SMTs. We do not have any plans to begin working on any code relating to these economic changes. But we do believe that this is a conversation worth having and one that we would be happy to participate in. Ultimately, the decision of when to begin work on these improvements, and in which hardfork to include them, will be up to the Steem community and the Witnesses they elect to approve Hardforks.

The EIP has 3 components all of which we believe must be implemented in tandem in order to deliver the desired effect. If you’re interested in learning more about the rewards curve and the options for improving it, @vandeberg (Senior Blockchain Engineer at Steemit) has published a more technical exploration of the subject.

Moving from a linear rewards curve to a convergent linear rewards curve. A convergent linear rewards curve would start out superlinear, providing minimal gains at first, and smoothly become linear as more votes are made. Users that are interested only in maximizing the return on their Steem Power, instead of benefitting the platform through thoughtful curation, often engage in practices such as self voting or delegation to bid bots. The proposed curve incentivises concentration of votes on to fewer pieces of content, which increases the visibility of such counterproductive behavior. Alternatively, users could choose to act more subtly by spreading stake across more, but smaller, votes at the cost of a suboptimal return. We cannot eliminate such behavior entirely, but we can make it less economically viable.
Increasing the percentage of rewards that are distributed to curators. One of the problems with Steem as it stands is that there is a strong incentive to self-vote. The more rewards are distributed to curators the less incentive there is to self-vote. At the same time, if curation is improved, then those content creators who are currently submitting great content which isn’t getting seen, should stand to benefit as that content will be more likely to get unearthed.
Create a separate “downvote pool.” Downvotes are a critical component for regulating Steem, but there is no incentive to render them because they are not rewarded. In fact, they cost voting mana which disincentivizes the use of the downvote. This creates more opportunities for self-voting abuse as it reduces the likelihood that this behavior will be countered. By adding a small pool for downvotes that is consumed prior to consuming voting mana, users are more free to downvote content as a curation mechanism without losing out on potential rewards themselves.

Feedback

Discussions like this have been extensive in the past and we want to share our opinion and continue the conversation started by community member @trafalgar. Our plans have not changed. We are working to finish auditing the SPS Hardfork, release a testnet, and make a public announcement which gives everyone (including exchanges) 30 days to review that code.

Our hope with the EIP is just to highlight the conversation so that the Steem community has time to come to a consensus about whether they want these changes, and what they feel is the best timing as far as including the changes in a future hardfork.

Let us know your thoughts on the Economic Improvement Proposal in the comments section below.

The Steemit Team

Comments · 91

@wongbraling(68)· 2593d
Nice Steemulus
@markrmorrisjr(71)· 2602d
This was a conversation worth having two years ago. There should never have been vote recharge not connected to some activity, whether in person curation, or preferably even content creation. it's the reason this is the first comment I've left on here in almost a year, when I was a full time steemer for nearly eighteen months, until it completely stopped being about the content.
@distantsignal(66)· 2629d
Am I missing something here? Are you proposing to take rewards away from Creators for Curators? I'm just catching up to this proposal and I've been seeing a 50/50 split bandied about.

As a creator, I cannot agree to this proposal. Creators should get the vast majority of the rewards on the system and right behind them should be witnesses and then finally the Curators.

If you want to make user retention better, stop focusing on the false promise of rewarding what amounts to passive participants with money and make the Steem Network easy to use. 100% of people who I've gotten to join give up after two days because of confusion and not enough INITIAL SP to explore the network. They don't get to vote and get confused about "Powering Up".

You're tinkering around with a car engine and ignoring that your car doesn't have seats for drivers. It's unreal that you think that just by throwing money at users that you'll get good curation. Users love the experience of sharing and commenting. They'll do it without compensation if the system is effortless to use.

This kind of thinking is killing the network. Remember the famous adage, "Keep it simple, stupid" and look at the experience from your run of the mill user and you'll get better retention.

Why is this so hard to understand?
@notconvinced(62)· 2629d
Wouldn't increasing curation rewards encourage self voting?

Also, the downvote is under utilized, because of the fear of retribution more than depleting mana, so the logic just isn't there and will only motivate whales to downvote more.

We need more details, because the current explanation doesn't make much sense.

What it looks like is that the big guys will only benefit more and the little guys even less than currently.

Keep in mind that your competition is only increasing and Steemit is losing it's headstart.

The RC's and mana feature is what's limiting interaction, which in turn is limiting growth.
@crypto.piotr(65)· 2631d
Dear @steemitblog

I really hope that you will find time to reply to my comment.

You wrote:

Increasing the percentage of rewards that are distributed to curators. One of the problems with Steem as it stands is that there is a strong incentive to self-vote.

I was wondering since yesterday ... (with those changes already implemeneted) if I would self-upvote myself then I will still benefit the same as I do right now. At least that's what my logic tells me.

After all as an "author" I would receive less, but as curator I would receive more. And at the end I would still have exactly same reward (if you summarize both).

Am I wrong somehow?

Yours Piotr
@indextrader24(75)· 2640d
Downvotes should be abolished - as long as the propblem of market power hasnt been solved.

Downvote with market power is able to destroy accounts and is leading to cencorship.

To reward such censorship of free spech is a bad sign here on steem, if you are not limiting or abolish the abuse of downvotes by ill brains in the community.
@muppetdingdong(39)· 2643d
@steemitblog, I actually stopped doing much on Steem once I realized bots make more money than real people, on an average user basis. Established community members, brands and channels do fine I guess, but the average user gets more bots commenting on their post than real people, and if you check out these bot wallets most of them are more profitable than the casual user, so shame on you for allowing that to happen at all.

New users now have to compete with a layer of paid bots before they ever get to compete with other content on an even footing.

Anyone who is a proponent of bots, simply has figured out how to game the system and doesn't want to reduce an income stream, Steem itself is probably a culprit here. Bots dominating the community are the ultimate death knell to a platform who's entire goal is people producing content and a system of upvoting.
1. You cannot allow bots on the platform, at all, period the end.
2. Should you fail #1, you cannot allow them to be profitable, at all, period the end. If they are economically viable, people will use them, you must close this loop to fix the core game theory issue here.
3. Should you fail #1 and #2, you cannot allow them to be the only thing the average user, who isn't economically killing it, sees and interacts with on their own posts and the average post they might find
This is one of those 3 strikes things, and lately, Steem has been 1-2-3-your out because this would make the platform run by bots and antithesis to itself.
@cre47iv3(70)· 2646d

You guys JUST DONT LIKE PEOPLE RIGHT?

We have NO VOICE. We are just Steemit Inc whores.

No matters what face is under Steemit Inc administration, they always F**K little ussers

Steemit Inc Policy: Fuck little ussers
> No matter when you read this.
I just dont want to write anymore, really, whats wrong with you? Its just amazing, how a new administration can be THAT EVIL.

The future? A few whales voting each other on his empty post.

Just...Why stupid people have always the power? What are we? Just GARBAGE. You just want to earn at any cost, even killing content creators.

Cant believe this is happening again.

Just a big fuck you! Go post on Twitter that descentralization news are needed then post same ideology as CNN on the same twit.

Anyways... No one is going to read this, because (surprise) im just a nobody

Hypocrites and cynics.
@king-oghie(68)· 2651d
Am outrageously excited about the new changes on Steemit. To make the platform more of social-media, wouldn't it be nice if the team could add a feature by the side of the resteem button showing the exact number of resteems a post has (if at all anyone resteemed that post). Just an idea though @steemitblog @ned
@vikisecrets(80)· 2651d
Another idea to improve and incentivize manual curation and to reduce bid bot and delegation abuse: Add a small "fee" for delegations: https://steemit.com/steemit/@vikisecrets/hf21-eip-solution-proposal-for-bid-bots-and-delegation-abuse-add-a-small-fee-for-delegations
@steemitboard(66)· 2652d
Congratulations @steemitblog! You received a personal award!

Happy Birthday! - You are on the Steem blockchain for 3 years!
_{You can view your badges on your Steem Board and compare to others on the Steem Ranking}

Vote for @Steemitboard as a witness to get one more award and increased upvotes!
@kabir88(61)· 2653d
How much work would it take to create a slider that allows authors to decide how much of the rewards to give to curators?
@felipejoys(74)· 2653d

more profitable for people to actively curate

It is already more profitable to curate. People just don't know how.

Increasing the percentage of rewards that are distributed to curators.

This sucks. It makes everything WORSE! Using big votes to rape the reward pool is so much easier that way.
@steemitsados(44)· 2654d
I agree with this opinion!!!
@jondoe(76)· 2655d
I think this would be a terrible idea. If these changes go through I think there is even less incentive to hold steem power. No one wants to come on here and spend hours "curating" the 10 "best posts" each day, literally no one. Get SMTS and communities done and let them decide their own economic systems.

Oh and a free downvote pool will get abused 100% guaranteed in that it will create downvote wars and people downvotinng people simple because they don't like them, irregardless of content. We have enough trouble keeping people here, if you make this place more toxic, you will have an even tougher time keeping them.
@remlaps(66)· 2655d
Have you seen the paper, A Puff of Steem: Security Analysis of Decentralized Content Curation (PDF)? I wrote a Steem post about it a couple weeks ago in A game-theoretic model of Steem's curation algorithm. It suggests that before worrying about distributing rewards, Steem may first need to improve its scoring system in order to rank posts correctly.

To that end, I have been advocating for quite some time to explore how a second price auction could be adapted to improve Steem's post valuation. Coincidentally, a few days before you posted this, I finally wrote a simulator to see how payouts would change under a vote-scoring method that's patterned after a second price auction. I wrote a short description on Steem in, Simulating a Steem curation rewards distribution that is modeled after a 2nd price auction. Gametheory.net says:

The theoretical nicety of second price auctions, first pointed out by William Vickrey, is that bidding one's true value is a dominant strategy

It seems that the primary drawback of that method is that it would encourage people to split their stakes, so it might be especially interesting to see how it interacts with the n²/(n + 1) weighting, which has the opposite effect.
@teamsteem(74)· 2655d
Question To Steemit Inc
1. When can investors expect the fundamentally flawed linear reward to be changed?
2. How many hours does it take to code a new curve?
3. Should current investors solely vote for themselves to avoid scammers to receive "free money for nothing" aka free Steem?
4. What are the benefits, if any, for investors to not solely vote for themselves?
5. The rational investors are increasing their piece of the pie with negligible work. Are there any estimates?
6. Who are the biggest rational investors what is their ROI?
7. Why did Steemit Inc implement the flawed linear reward curve?
8. Where did Steemit explain why linear rewards weren't flawed anymore before implementing them?
9. Why mention @trafalgar as the initiator of this discussion while knowing this is incorrect? - Many people pointed out linear rewards were flawed, way before @trafalgar did, among them, none other than @dantheman in the original whitepaper, @steemitblog, @felixxx, @ats-david, me, among many others.
In February 2017 Steemit Inc re-highlighted why linear rewards are fundamentally flawed, yet they never retracted their statement before pushing for linear rewards to be implemented.

In a world with honest people who don't vote on themselves to get "free money for nothing", a simple linear curve, aka n would produce a 1 share 1 vote proportional payout. This is the blue line and shows the ideal situation.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where people will attempt to game the system by voting for themselves. If everyone voted for themselves then the result would be simple interest payments and have no economic impact.

More here.
@voxxe(52)· 2655d
May I recommend that the downvoting feature be removed? It is a completely negative and unnecessary feature... that tends to end up censoring and penalising anything unpopular. If you like something, upvote it. If you don't like something, move on!
@liberosist(72)· 2656d
The fundamental issue is that on Steem, a very significant portion of the reward pool is allocated by bid bots.

According to Steemdb, just yesterday, the top 5 bid bots alone allocated an astounding 27% of the reward pool. I don't have the latest numbers but in mid-2018, the last time I investigated this "organic curation" accounted for less than 25% of the reward pool.

Moving to a convergent linear rewards curve. While this may show a marginal gain in visibility of profitable behaviour, it also comes at the cost of further disincentivizing the already squeezed minnow voters. Discussing with active curators and content creators, we found that the vast majority of actual, engaged contributors to Steem as a social network have low stakeholding. On the flip side, this will minimize sybil attacks, but given the insane inequality on Steem, sybil attacks are a negligible concern at best. I'll withhold final judgment till I see the exact numbers and some simulations, but for now, I'm neutral about this. It's worth the trial and error.

Increasing the percentage of rewards that are distributed to curators. Whilst this may encourage the minority of organic curators to curate more, it comes at a steep cost as disincentivizing content creators. Without content, there will be no curation. I was a proponent of going back to 50:50 in 2016, but discussing the matter with the most engaged content creators on Steem over the years, I have realised this would be divisive and unpopular move.

It'll only be a marginal deterrent to self-voting abuse. To a self-voter, they get a 100% split every time, matters not what the split is. Sure, for further voting, they'll now share more with curators who vote after the self-vote, but they don't really care - they have already cashed in the initial 100%, anything after that is a bonus. We have evidence for the type of personalities that engage in self-voting, they are often ruthless and selfish. I'm sure they would be slightly more inclined to vote elsewhere; but it seems to me their primary goal of rampant self-voting will remain largely unaffected.

Similarly, bid bots will see marginal losses at best. Whatever they lose in bid surplus, they'll make up a significant portion (though not all) of it in greater curation rewards. The end result would be a slight decrease in net income, but nowhere near enough to put them out of business.

Finally, the whales who are delegating to bid bots will continue to do so. Given the above, whales will see a slight decrease in ROI. I've done the maths on this in mid-2018, to make curation even in the same ballpark as lucrative as delegating to bid bots, you need to offer a ~85% curation rewards split, which would of course kill the content creation community overnight.

Considering all benefits and drawbacks, this one's difficult. I'd be open to experimenting with a relatively conservative change in split and see what the results show.

Create a separate "downvote pool." I'm all for enabling downvoting, but I remain unconvinced that a downvote pool is a sustainable solution. Users are more free to downvote, sure, but the abuser is also free to revenge downvote by the same amount. Most people don't want to get caught up in a perpetual downvote game with whales. All that said, I agree that it is a net benefit, and I would support this change pending a better solution.
@eonwarped(70)· 2657d
I support the principles underlying this economic proposal.

I suspect many don't realize that even the convergent linear curve proposed is subtle and needs correct tuning to be effective. I've documented my fairly brief exploration of this in this post. And hopefully it helps with understanding the reward curve in the first place.
@riseofth(62)· 2658d
First of all, Steem's inflation should be removed for rewarding the content creators and it should be delegated to front-end DApps. DApps can launch their own TOKEN and reward algorithm to discover contents. Current inflation is not keeping up with low demand. If Steem did not have relative high inflation, it would easily sit at top 30 in CMC.

Steem's Inflation should go to protocol developments, witness compensation and PoS interest (2-3% vs current 8.5%). Rewarding content creators should be done with SMTs. STINC can launch their own SMT and share profit from ads with celebrity creators by SMTs.

Steem Investors can earn TOKENs through RC/SP delegations. @steemhunt is already showing a good example. Creators and DApps will figure out optimum synergy with a token.

All the front-end DApps can try their own SMTs with different distribution technique. Finding a sweet algorithms to rewarding the best content is more than rocket science. A former founder, @dan thinks that he can fix it, I totally disagree.

DApps with SMTs can try different algos. @steemhunt, @actifit, @dlike and others are already experimenting. Steem's inflation and broken rewarding is helping its price.
@ozphil(66)· 2658d
If bid-bots are the problem, why would you increase curation rewards. Such an increase would only increase the incentive for more people to use bidbots. Why not find a technical way to effectively outlaw bid-bots?

If self-voting is a genuine problem (and I am not convinced it is) then disable the ability to self vote (yes people could create a second or third account - but the friction of logging in and out will eliminate some of it).

Maybe the answer is to add a non-rewards voting capability that is used to determine trending, hotlists, etc. It may be more pure because there would be much less incentive to game it.

Finally let me personalize the look, headers, footers, etc of my blog so I feel like I have more ownership of it. Improve the search tools so content is more discoverable. Show links to related content to drive me deeper into the site, etc.
@redouanemez(69)· 2658d
I think the only big problem is that most users do not read the content, and eventually people who want to work seriously and give good quality content will not be well rewarded, and therefore it does not motivate these creators quality content, so it will be a good thing to find a solution that will motivate users to be more creative and this will undoubtedly give more success to the STEEM community.

Raising the curations will be a good approach.
@spectrumecons(75)· 2658d
Thanks. This is great news that Steemit are taking a closer look at the economics and reward incentives.

I agree with (2) increasing curation rewards and (3) separate downvote pool. I am not sure about the 'convergent linear rewards' curve. I fear that such a curve could hurt new users and those with low SP. Getting the formula correct could be tricky. Based on @vandeberg's post the formula would be something like n^2/(n/c+1). 'c' being the most critical parameter in this equation. Too low, it makes almost no difference and too high the new users could be too heavily penalised.

I think different formulae for the rewards curve should be investigated but I would not jump on the current proposed 'convergent linear rewards' curve.
@nextgen622(76)· 2658d
I fully support all 3 components of this proposal, and I think it should be implemented ASAP.
@raj808(77)· 2659d
As someone has mentioned in their comment that we might drive away some whale stake in the form of pay for vote services, I say... So what! And here's why.

Those, so called, services take a huge amount out of the pool without ever creating any value. Unless you labor under the delusion that there is value in meritless content achieving fake standing. Why would we want such investors or such mechanisms? I'm not sure.

There are businesses on steem, such as steemhunt etc, trying to build genuine marketing/advertising use cases for serious investment in steem... Yet the bidbot driven shitshow drives all the potential growth of audience away within weeks of joining. This stifles any chance of further, and larger, positive investment in this space. Why would anyone invest big buying millions of steem to try and incentivise a none existent audience?

There is far too little consideration and concern for the small users on steem and what they represent; audience for any development (new games or dapps) or potential businesses thinking of building on steem. The users, and their UX, are what will make or break long term success and at the moment steem is not a pleasant experience for new users. Anything that systematically destroys UX is counter intuitive and should be weeded out asap. If this proposal could even come close to achieving that, it would be worth it in the long term, however painful it may be in the short term.

There are plenty of people in this comment thread preaching that we need to just ignore all this and focus on SMT and community. I don't agree, as SMTs without a solid coin and Blockchain functioning to limit attacks on the USP of the platform, will simply become another mechanism of abuse by bot owners and vote farmers. It would end up like a never ending spiral of tokens perpetuating centralised agendas. The irony being that many community SMTs would probably be created to try and address the balance but their value will be dragged down by closed communities (circle jerks) building hype and inflated value through carrot/stick mentality.

So yeah, get the ship in order (steem rewards mechanisms) as well as inventing new ways to power said ship. If the holes aren't patched though, the ship will sink regardless of any shiny new outboard motor!
@pibara(68)· 2659d
A counter proposal of three alternate measures:
- Introduce a transparent fish-size bonus
- Make reputation impact opt-in in the voting API
- Make advertising and advertising revenues an intrinsic part of the STEEM economy
@novacadian(65)· 2659d
After reading through the post and almost all of the comments it seems like the real target that is trying to be cured are the Lack of Brain or bot votes. Although talked about a great deal there is one solution for self voting.... remove it again.

If you were told there was a way to reward real PoB votes over bot votes with a slight inconvieniance to the user, while offering additional transaction rewards to non-top.twnety witnesses, would you be interested?

Here's my year old idea.
@zammie(60)· 2659d
If you want to really improve the economics of steem, give a bigger percentage of the steem reward pool to the steempower hodlers
@valued-customer(75)· 2659d
I've been here since just prior to HF19 (I just realized that today is actually my two year anniversay IIRC), and have watched the slow decline in Steem's ranking on Coinmarketcap from the 30s to 63 today. I believe you are addressing the primary cause of that slide in this OP, and appreciate that very much. Steem has several advantages over ETH and BTC, and is a better cryptocurrency IMHO. We should be attaining better capital gains for that reason, were all else equal. Clearly, all else is not equal.

The fundamental problem that has created that inequality is that ROI for substantial stake is enabled by extracting rewards. One of the most compelling advantages of Steem is it's use case: the social media platform and the community of creators and consumers of content. Few mechanisms have shown to be as powerful as social media, as the FAANGs reveal. Rewards were intended to encourage high quality content that would attract new investors, and thus produce capital gains, via curation. But extracting rewards for ROI does not focus on content quality, and instead overwhelms it with a more powerful, immediate financial motivation. This is contrary to investment purposes, and depresses capital gains.

The suggestions put forward here today in the OP have been long advocated by @trafalgar and others, but they do not address this basic conflict between investment and profiteering. I submit that until that conflict is addressed, the problem will continue.

I propose introducing a new mechanism for producing ROI from stake that rewards delegation and funding of development intended to improve Steem. The SPS (SteemDAO) would be a likely means of doing so, and the recent election of the form of the @steemalliance intended to choose which developments would be funded both have become available now to effect this mechanism. The purpose of this would be to reverse the extraction of operational funds (profiteering) and promote development intended to improve the investment vehicle (Steem) and so drive capital gains.

No other blockchain I am aware of (acknowledging my relative nescience on this detail) provides comparable mechanism for attaining ROI from stake to such a dividend, yet many produce far better capital gains - the traditional point of investment since prehistory.

In addition to replacing the mechanism for attaining that dividend as incentive for HODLing Steem, I propose making rewards unsuitable for profiteering by limiting the extractive potential. An algorithm that limited rewards to no less than 3%, nor more than 300%, of the median would allow two orders of magnitude for differentially rewarding quality content, yet limit the ability of substantial stake to extract ROI to insignificant quantities. This is what Huey Long proposed regarding income for Americans prior to his assassination, probably because he made too much sense to folks suffering during the Great Depression, and was a threat to the banksters that have ever since increased their possession of American wealth and production.

We have also felt the impact of a dismal retention rate - less than 10% of new accounts are still active after a year. Many new users get no rewards at all from their posts regardless of quality, since it takes time to create a network, and many get discouraged and give up. Huge effort is undertaken by many good people in the community to counter this problem, and the proposed algorithm would assist in that endeavor. @arcange daily posts relevant statistics that can be plugged into this proposal to produce accurate values, but I'm just gonna use round, easy numbers in example here.

If the median post pays 3 Steem, then the max reward would be 9 Steem, and the minimum would be .9 Steem. 9 Steem is not enough to drive profiteering, so bidbots, self votes and etc., would be discouraged, enabling actual curation for quality to be the only reason to upvote. While .9 Steem is seemingly insubstantial, it is indeed 100% more than nothing, which many new users get presently for their early posts. It's some encouragement, and so little that it isn't a significant hardship to bear in order to improve retention. Particularly substantial stakeholders might note that this is a huge increase in the financial incentive over the extant situation to retain new users, and consider that very small cost relative to the value of retaining a network user.

Most authors aren't getting 9 Steem payouts for their posts today. Even the average payout, skewed by the bidbots, circle jerks, and self votes, is less than 9 Steem. By encouraging substantial stakeholders to actually invest in development by creating a divided stream, it is likely the median payout will increase, approaching the average as bidbots decline in impact, or are even eliminated altogether. That would by my, and many other's, preference. Folks using bidbots to generate profit could simply adapt to the dividend mechanism, and being nimble, would likely make that transition very quickly, as quickly as they appeared after HF19.

I don't think it's necessary to address how this would improve trending. Only those most dedicated to financial extraction and profiteering might prefer the extant model of trending to one produced through actual curation intended to promote quality.,

Water flows downhill because of gravity. Different planets have different gravity, and water flows downhill at different rates on them. Gravity is like code. However, code can do something physics can't and replace gravity with something else altogether. Stake, like water, seeks the best route to ROI, and tweaking the code can change the rate at which extractive profiteering returns ROI to stakeholders, as @trafalgar's proposal does, and as the different gravity of different planets do to water flow. Making the changes I propose is not like altering the rate, but more like replacing gravity with a different force altogether.

Instead of creating incentive to extract ROI from rewards better purposed to market Steem, it creates incentive to extract ROI from improving the investment vehicle, driving capital gains. I believe this would better meet the needs of Steemit, Steem, the community, and particularly investors who throughout history have been driven by the incentive of capital gains. Far more upwards ROI is potential from capital gains than from extracting the funds necessary for marketing for ROI.

I'd appreciate any substantive comment regarding this proposal specifically, or the underlying principles it's based on.

Thanks!
@arcange(79)· 2659d
Congratulations @steemitblog! Your post was mentioned in the Steem Hit Parade in the following category:
- Comments - Ranked 1 with 242 comments
@mattockfs(61)· 2659d
I thought you guys just announced being out of beta and being out of survival mode? These three proposals are impeding(1), disruptive(2) and futile (3) respectively.
1. Good idea but not as is and not on its own. It hurts new accounts and without a peer solution that aids new accounts, for example with rewards for pulling in advertising revenues, imparting platform growth is not a price we should be willing to pay for solving this problem. Further, see my comments on @vandeberg his post.
2. Please warn us 14 weeks before implementing this "feature". One week for retracting our delegations and 13 weeks for a full power down. This feature fucks over content providers who arguably create value for the platform, to create more revenues for bid bot owners and the like. If this feature gets implemented I'm out of here. It's a platform killer. Seriously it is!
3. Wrong solution. Instead do something about false reputation. We hardly flag because we know crap content providers will just bidbot themselves bulletproof and then once they are, retaliate any flags we have them. Find a way to exclude bidbot votes from reputation building, then hardfork all existing false reputation out of the blockchain. That will remove our hesitance to flag crap posts more than a separate pool would.
@mattclarke(71)· 2659d
Really glad to see this back on the agenda. I'd prefer n2, but this is a reasonable middle ground. So, when can we start talking about going back to 104 week powerdowns?
@jwolf(71)· 2659d
@trafalgar is 100% right.

Economics are most important than SMTs right now.

I hope this can be solved even if it will be hard because most of the witnesses have bid bots and won't agree :)
@raj808(77)· 2659d
I've read through nearly 50 comments on this post from a diverse set of users ranging from people who perpetuate vote-selling, to old school steemians who've been pissed at how steems economic system has incentivised this leach of value for a long time. It's undoubtedly a complex issues. I've only been around 20 months, but I've observed a few home truths.

The way things are incentivised on steem works to drive away the people you want to encourage to stay to fulfill steems original value proposition. Good content creators are driven away by vote selling and whale circle jerks. It's that simple. I can only speak from my perspective but I've been writing less and less high level content on steem because it's simply not worth my time! It's very important to understand that this statement is not me self agrandising; the only way to encourage all those bloggers using WordPress, YouTubers and serious freelance writers from places like medium onto steem, is to have a platform that consitently rewards based on quality. Tbh, if we could achieve that the influx of users would be immense and maybe some larger incentive to power up steem might be needed.... Oh wait a minute.... Higher curation rewards might provide that incentive!?

The price of steem increases with the demand and how will that happen with no new content creators? At the moment they're either leaving, or if they can stomach the insulating levels of payout on posts, then they're cashing everything out as they have no confidence in the system! Apart from ideots like me who've powered up nearly everything earned and even bought some steem. Or, they give in and buy votes, or start putting less effort into posts. This issue with trending, bidbots and vote buying is literally creating negative marketing for the whole ecosystem. Short term gain to a few people at the cost of many people and the overall price and perception of steem currency/Blockchain.

I'm in favour of these proposals... If they can be shown to make manual curation return better ROI than delegating to bidbots. This is not about my dissatisfaction with my steem journey at this point, but rather saving the original USP of steem and the only thing which might restore faith and bring huge numbers of new users in the case of a potential bull run this year. It is now or never with this. There are far too many people raping this economy for short term gains and as @trafalgar pointed out... the best we can hope for is to try and incentivise good behaviour before steem disappears further up it's own ass.

Ok, I'm paraphrasing a little 🤣😉

But, seriously! something needs to change before EOS brings out it's own crypto socmedia/content platform or steem will be in big trouble, despite being the first mover of a decentralised proof of brain social platform.
@jaki01(77)· 2659d
1.: I would clearly support a convergent linear reward curve!

2.: I could live with higher curation rewards, even if I don't support it: It's hard enough for new users anyway: to create an account, have enough RC for upvoting and answering comments, earning any small amount with their posts. It would get even worse! And if then for example I would be one of the few upvoters of such a small new account I would get a big part of the reward myself (as curation) instead to be able to give it to the author ...

I really like to curate already NOW with only 25 % curation reward if I find good stuff (I don't care when I vote and who else did vote). I curate because I like what I see. I think the voting behavior of people who are curating this way wouldn't change much with higher curation reward. I guess only people who curate just for earning money, most of the time in an automated way (without reading what they curate) would be affected by this change. And they still wouldn't support new users anyway. Thus they still wouldn't support the growth of the platform. To my mind, this kind of voting behaviour, which is geared towards short-term profit, only apparently leads to a higher return on investment: although more STEEM is acquired, the STEEM price is reduced by lowering the attractiveness of the network for the majority of users and thus also potential investors. I would like to forego earning even one more STEEM if I knew that this would raise the STEEM price to 20 euros in the long run ... :-)

3.: As I have already stated in My STEEM Vision. (I would appreaciate you to read the full post), in my opinion the suggestion to provide each user with a certain number of 'free downvotes' (by adding a "downvote pool") so that spam (or overvalued posts) would be flagged more frequently in the future, wouldn't really make a big difference under the current conditions. I assume that only whales flagged more often than before, while smaller accounts would still not dare to do so for fear of retaliation. As I have described in my post, I think flaggs (downvotes) are an important part of the STEEM ecosystem, but at the same time users should be protected against 'despotic' flagging.
@steemitboard(66)· 2659d
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To support your work, I also upvoted your post!

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New japanese speaking community Steem Meetup badge
Vote for @Steemitboard as a witness to get one more award and increased upvotes!
@wisdomandjustice(75)· 2659d
Absolutely agree with you and @trafalgar. No change NO survive.
@bil.prag(76)· 2659d
greed and lust will doom them all.

Posted using Partiko Android
@wasim1(65)· 2659d
Dear steemit drivers, all is well. you does not need to change anything again in steemit. just implement SMT and see, when steem will touch 1$, you will see rain of new quality bloggers here. And everything will be fine.. please don't make shitty changes by the name of HF21. HF20 is the result of the current situation of steemit. Now please not again, i hate Hard fork.
@eastmael(69)· 2659d
This is a hard topic and is worthy of discussion. Thank you for involving the STEEM community. Although I don't have any immediate idea in mind, I'd like to watch (and hopefully get involved) into its discussions moving forward.
@cloudspyder(60)· 2659d
Those three proposal will only drive away most investor who hold big stake as bot operator in my opinion. Because, people do invest to make profit and not to lost.

Why not just add reward poll to reward post based on organic view from search engine. In addition, this post will keep rewarded until it adds value to the blockchain. Let author earn like they own the website as there personal blog. You may get those fund from adverts.

This makes those author out there to start blogging on steem blockchain instead of registering there domain name. Furthermore, it encourage old user to post only and really quality post.
@stevescoins(70)· 2659d

if curation is improved, then those content creators who are currently submitting great content which isn’t getting seen, should stand to benefit as that content will be more likely to get unearthed.

that is an assumption

curators that are investors are going to be looking for the best ROI; they are not necessarily looking to provide the best curation

We have three competing interests here: curators that curate, curators that invest, and content creators.

All three groups have valid concerns.

I really don't see any mechanic that is going to make investors curate; time is an investment as well.

A final note, as the bulk of my return comes from creation in a niche area, I don't like proposals assigning more return to curators, especially when the nature of the platform is that some curators are investors...but that's my bias ;>
@numpypython(68)· 2660d
I'd support points 1 and 3 but how does point 2 about the rewards split fix the economy again?

There are accounts making 100 - 300 steem a day (multiple posts) off a single whale's vote. Point 2 would just make it more profitable for the whale voting on thin content.
@bryan-imhoff(69)· 2660d
I don't believe changes such as these will alter the behavior of large stake bad actors in any way. The main problem is that these accounts have large votes that single handedly propel the rshares of the content they vote on to a very high point in the curve which matches the current economics, thus no change occurs for them. There also will be no change to self voting patterns because this remains the best ROI for them. Even with a 50/50 split enacted, large accounts would have to have votes nearly equivalent to their own voting strength come on to the post subsequent to their upvote in order to begin to match the gains they'll get from self voting and scooping both the author and curator payout on their own content. This doesn't happen because of their sheer size, as it takes a huge number of small users to match them. The only viable alternative for large accounts is to split their vote into many smaller votes, which I'm sure is the preferred outcome, but is entirely unreasonable to expect we'll see better quality curation out of this. Telling an investor that to see good returns they'll merely need to read, evaluate, and vote on a couple thousand articles a day using 1% of their upvote strength is a non starter. It'll still be sold, outsourced, etc resulting in no change to curation. The only thing that will begin to make curation more viable is a much larger userbase and a broadening middle class. These proposals actually stunt the growth of both with lessened author rewards and curtailed voting power at the low end. Curation should be organic. Vote on what you like. All of these changes seem to aim at making users guess what will be the most rewarded, which isn't organic discovery.

We have yet to see how the current system will function at full scale. I firmly believe that when there are tens of millions of active users and voters, we'll see genuine opportunities for profitable curation under the current ruleset, and self voting insular whales will merely handicap themselves by not growing a fanbase and interacting positively with the broader community.

The only thing I would support is some form of continuing to normalize and encourage downvotes. Much of this could be simply educational and psychological, not even on the blockchain level. Badges and avatars, a quick hover over a user that'll show stats on how broadly they curate, how much they self upvote, etc. A complete overhaul of the reputation system that embraces this. (self upvotes decrease visible rep score?)

All in all, far too much time is being spent on how to influence a few dozen people to not be short sighted... and far too little is being spent on how to prepare Steem for millions of users. We should be asking ourselves how proposals like this impact users holding 1-5 Steem power. If we get to 100 million accounts... that's how much 99% of those accounts will have. If we get to even 10 million active users in the next couple years, given Steem inflation we're looking at each account earning a median of approximately 3 Steem per year. And that's the median... since early adopters will vastly outperform that, virtually all average users following any kind of widespread adoption will see less than 1 Steem per year in earnings. Period.

Forget trying to figure out if 99.9% of the future users will get .8 Steem or .6 Steem a year. Leave improved curation and community specific rewards up to SMTs, Oracles, and 2nd layer systems as has been the seeming plan all along.

Create the much needed Resource Credit pools for dApps, communities and large scale adoption. If you want to change the current dynamic somewhat, do not allow RCs and SP to be separated during delegation. Serious businesses that have need of both the RCs and the SP for responsibly building and rewarding their communities will inherently pay more for these combined delegations than a bid bot project that has no use for the RC component and we'll see more SP shift to sustainable and responsible business applications and allow a better avenue for passive investors to pursue ROI. And finish polishing up that Promoted Post system to wrestle back some of the "exposure" spending from bid bots and create a counter to Steem inflation!
@lordbutterfly(80)· 2660d
The proposals made by @trafalgar and @kevinwong i will describe as being by far the worst proposal on the STEEM blockchain with the largest support.

The consequences of such a change are extremely dire and should not even be considered. By giving this proposal attention like you are currently doing, you are legitimizing it. Something this proposal does not deserve in the slightest.

There are a large number of places you can start when trying to address the Steem economics. Adjusting the split or the curve is not it. Adopting their ideas is akin to platform suicide. Avoid at all cost.

The problems of this platform stem from lack of accountability, lack of governance, lack of any kind of repressive apparatus. A perfect economic system does not exist. It will never exist and it has never existed. Only fools think otherwise.

People are greedy and cannot govern themselves without having tools set in place.

If you want to fix steem, set up the tools. (And filter the damn bots from Steemit trending page. You can at least do that.)
@stackin(78)· 2660d
This is a suggestion...

What if we limit a person to 1 upvote to an particular account for 72 hours. This may spread many people to upvoting and curating better content/accounts.

There are other platforms that are currently doing that and it’s making the curator vote for others as they can’t keep voting the same person all the time with a three day period time limit 🤔

This will tame the bidbots, selfvoting, and circle dick suckin' action LOL

Just a suggestion but it does work!
@ladyrebecca(70)· 2660d
I don't doubt your intentions are good, but, the way I see it, these proposals will do more harm than good. The main reason big accounts generate big rewards is not necessarily self-vote, but circle-jerking, and this will go on no matter what changes you make in terms of curation. Circle-jerking is how the system works at every level, let's be honest. Big accounts will still be making money... As for small accounts who barely make anything, they'll get even less. 'Come for the money!' What money are we talking about? New users struggle to make a few cents and stand to make even less under the proposals. There is no incentive to curate posts that make a few cents. I am one of those who never bothered much with curation rewards, for the past weeks I've been voting regularly a new user with good content who makes a few cents a post. But as I stand to lose in author rewards a better strategy for me would be to vote for big accounts regularly to compensate for my loss... I might as well put some big accounts on auto-vote and be done with all curation business. As for the downvote pool, that's tricky, too. If people used downvotes to eliminate spam and all that, yeah, that would be great. On the other hand, we could see even more downvote wars... and frankly I've had enough of them....
@clayop(74)· 2660d
While I like those technical approach, I don't think changing the current reward dynamics on STEEM is a good idea. Because there are diverse opinions on this issue, as we can see many people's comments here, moving towards in favor of one side of them would make the other sides dissatisfied.

Rather, I argue for removing contents rewards, i.e. author rewards and curation rewards, from STEEM and shifting the role to sub-community tokens, a.k.a. SMTs. Steemit also can issue STEEMIT SMT that has similar or suggested (by @vanderberg) PoB economics to the current STEEM. Others like @trafalgar can issue alternative SMT that meets his EIP. This approach has several merits.
1. Given the approach, we can focus on SMT development and don't need waste time for debates and following code changes about the economic model.
2. Market models will work. Various approaches can be experimented and be proven their values in the market as a token price. This survival of the fittness environment will strengthen Steem's ecosystem.
3. By removing PoB rewards from STEEM, its inflation can be dramatically reduced, hence investors can be more attracted to the base currency STEEM. Also, investors don't need to compete with contents creators by self-vote, etc. to ensure higher ROI.
4. Given decreased inflation, we have more room for ecosystem-level experiments like Steem Proposal System by @blocktrades.
This change make STEEM as a base currency and investor-friendly token; they can earn identical ROI without doing 10 self-votes per day. For comparison, in the current system investors who don't self vote have much less ROI than those do 10 times per day. It will also reduce meaningless votes from investors' purposes.

Some SMTs can be built on the investors return. Good-will (or smart) investors, or Steemit inc. may launch SMTs which value and inflation speed are pegged to STEEM. I am sure there will be much more creative ideas for Steem's growth.

I wish the dev team solely focus on SMT and redeveloment the whole thing with the new paradigm, rather than band-aiding the current things.
@therealwolf(77)· 2660d

Moving from a linear rewards curve to a convergent linear rewards curve.

Yes.

Increasing the percentage of rewards that are distributed to curators.

Yes.

Create a separate “downvote pool.”

Yes.

I talked about my reasoning for increased curation rewards & downvote-pool in this post a few months ago.
@doitvoluntarily(80)· 2660d
is there any way to ever share the advertising revenue from the ads with the users? so that they can earn residuals?
@ikrahch(73)· 2660d
Can you guys tell the final date of SMT? Please 😈

Posted using Partiko Android
@georgeknowsall(9)· 2660d
Wow! you really want to screw the little guy and reward the bigger accounts.
@tj4real(69)· 2660d
One thing i know for sure is the Economics of steem isnt really working and we need to fix it. The proposal will also mean only rich people get most of the reward as curation will favour them. Lets assume we launch SMTs, from what i beleive we can try it an implement this system on one of the communities to test how efficient it. But as at this time, i think the economic metric isnt working and the solution isnt really changing values
@kingrefat(54)· 2660d
I support all these things together . #change my mind @steemitblog.
@honeydue(79)· 2660d
Completely against all of these proposals. If you're so hellbent on changing the rewards system, why not make it optional? If I, as a content creator, wish to go 50/50, I can make that choice. If I wish to keep it at 75/25, I should also be able to make that choice. I don't see why one rule should affect all accounts, since curation itself only helps a handful of rich accounts...

Seems to me that all these proposed changes are detours for Steemit.inc. If it ain't broke, why fix it? Why not focus on SMTs and other changes that would help grow the platform?

Just my two cents' worth...
@preparedwombat(79)· 2660d

Moving from a linear rewards curve to a convergent linear rewards curve.

Inevitably, large accounts that game the system with the current linear reward curve would come up with innovative ways to game the system with a convergent linear rewards curve.
@jrcornel(82)· 2660d
We are bringing this up now? I would rather just wait till SMTs and communities and let them implement their own economics.
@clayboyn(75)· 2660d
So basically we're going to address all of the community concerns and fix the shit that we've told you was broken for three years after leaving beta? Was waiting while whales systematically destroyed any semblance of a middle class on the platform and made the majority of the community leave worth it?
@hanshotfirst(80)· 2660d
As a content guy, I have a few serious concerns.

First, I think this would be repeating a very big mistake from the past: changing too many variables at once. If you changed all three of these at once, it would be impossible to gauge the impact of any one of them.

Second, the problem's outlined above involve the selfish use of upvotes at the expense of the success of the platform as a whole. Over my nearly three years here, I have not seen any evidence that would lead me to believe downvotes would be used in an unselfish way. In fact, all of the evidence points to the exact opposite. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that receiving (and I mean receiving not earning) a downvote creates a far worse user experience than simply not receiving an upvote. I think it is safe to say that a person earning a reward, seeing the reward and then having the reward taken away is far worse than simply never receiving the reward in the first place (and I am talking about feeling and emotion here, not logic). I am sure someone cashed a huge grant check to study that bit of common sense... but I'm not going to search for it.

Third, why the urgency to change this now? Why not see what communities and SMTs accomplish before adding in another variable?
@jrcornel(82)· 2660d
I would rather see SMTs launched and then communities able to implement their own economics within their own communities.

I don't think changing things on steemit.com does much good at this point. I would rather just wait for SMTs and communities and let them set their own economics, maybe even eventually exploring an SMT for steemit.com itself at some point.
@gduran(68)· 2660d
Increasing curation rewards will just help those who have a lot of SP, I see no way in which that could help Steemit. The main problem is the we have this circle jerk voting, you scratch my back and I will scratch yours, and nobody else gets votes, 50/50 curation makes no difference to them because they always vote for the same people and they get the same votes back, the money they get will always be more or less the same. Only now they can also vote for other content and get 50% of whatever that author gets, win /win for them and lose/lose for the author, if anything reduce curation rewards that might do something. The problem with Steemit isn't curation, or bid bots or linear or curved rewards, the problem is greed.
@smooth(74)· 2660d
I support these changes (as well as the notion that they won't fix every problem but will make undesirable behavior less economically incentivized, which is all we can do with the blockchain) but I also support the focus on SPS first. Once SPS is in place then this can be revisited as a proposal for stakeholder consideration, as well as giving stakeholders the opportunity to weigh in on priorities on this work vs. other work.
@prydefoltz(75)· 2660d
Link pay-outs to engagement too. Create an engagement score and apply that to the payout formula.

Therefore it is not just your SP that governs pay-outs but also your level of engagement. How many unique comments did you receive, how many did you give? And if your upvotes were always on the same account, or handful of accounts, there will be a negative effect on your ES. This way we can get away from a punishment mentality and concentrate on rewarding the accounts that foster and pursue engagement.

Also bring back view counts and link them to proof of brain.
@drutter(73)· 2660d
At first glance through, I'm not in favour of passing this omnibus bill which gets government involved in regulating the economy rather than focusing on their basic duties and allowing the free market to flourish.
@bluengel(71)· 2660d
More Curation Rewards is Goooooood !

DownVote Pool is not Helpful for Vituous Cycle of Steem when it abused downvoting in Harmful way i.e. in Personal !

Posted using Partiko Android
@cardboard(65)· 2660d
With those changes, in my opinion, users will just move from delegating to bidbots to selling the "right" to vote in their name to services like minnowbooster and smartsteem.

Also many users enjoy the passive income that comes with the delegation. Maybe you are focusing too much on the social side of steem, failing to see it as a platform for many other services / businesses. If so, private chat on steemit would be a great start (it doesn't have to be on blockchain).
@raycoms(71)· 2660d
I don't believe all three together will have the expected results, especially the reward curve, in my opinion, increases the incentive to use voting bots to upvote your content. Using these bots is much more worthwhile especially for smaller quantities of votes.

I do support the curation change since it gives investors more control over their votes and is an incentive to vote organically. Nonetheless, it would also lead to higher concentrations of votes on fewer accounts.

I think the most promising change would be a separate downvote pool since that gives people more control over who (in their opinion) deserves rewards or not.
@dana-edwards(75)· 2660d
Good job, maybe there is some hope for Steem. Let's have this discussion.
@bashadow(70)· 2660d
I still think the best way to Fix the curation issue that everyone seems to be so concerned about is to simply write in code that completely randomly starts the curation payout timer. With that one simple action then curation becomes a reality because there is no way to game the start time of curation.

Right now almost everyone thinks the 12-17 minute time frame is the absolute best time to vote to maximize most curation rewards. Vote buyers and sellers and bots and vote trails all shoot for this time frame, vote trail votes are not curation, vote bots are not curation,vote buys are not curation.

Curation is people voting for content they like regardless of what time the post was posted. That is curation. Can you imagine what the trending page would look like if you completely ignored the number of votes a post received in the first hour? It would be a real trending page then.

I understand the random start time of curation reward payouts will never be a reality, at least not on steemit, after all look at your post a free downvote pool, yes by all means lets reward bad behavior, and there is a lot of bad behavior downvoting going on whether you or anyone else wants to see it or admit it.

People are punished forever for a error in judgement, look at mack.bot, it does not matter if the person changed their ways, they are punished for ever until they simply give up. A downvote needs to be for a cause, and downvoting a comment someone made simply because they made a comment is wrong, Down voting a post that does not violate any of the suggestions for a reason for downvoting simply because of a bad decision in the past is wrong.

I would like to think the downvote pool is not a done deal, but the writing is on the wall and it seems the decision has already been made.
@masterthematrix(61)· 2660d
I would like to see, that the Coin "Steem" and its "Reward Pool" will be designed more towards an infrastructure Coin instead of using it primary for POB content discovery. The reason for that this is, that with the introduction of communities and SMT the Steem Ecosystem is not only more about "Content creation" and discovery. No, we have a bunch of financial dapps, gaming dapps, services etc... which don't have anything to do with content discovery. All those Dapps should have more or less "equal" chances to receive Support from the underlying Steem Reward Pool mechanism to earn and empower their communities. I think Steem is good with Steempower for Voting on Witnesses and Proposals (plus a new feature in the future Voting for Communities and Dapps) and as a source of Ressource Credits. For me that should be enough, on the level what Steem is doing to support its Ecosystem and for the use of the POB mechanism...only vote for Witnesses, Proposals and SMT or Communities. No, more voting and abusing the reward pool by creating and discovering or gaming the content creation part. All this POB content creation and discovery mechanism should be happening on the level of SMTs, and its communities, because these groups will have Admins who are able to set in rules how each community handles its users and the way they value content creation. If Steem gets understood as a infrastructure Token and SMTs are understood as a empowering Community Token, than we have a clear Vision for all participants Investors, Users and Creators alike. I don't like the idea that we are aiming for a SMT Ecosystem where all these project fight for attention but the real mining of Steem only happens on the content side of things...somehow that doesn't make sense. Why should other Dapps or Communities suffer from miss management of the Steem Reward Pool which is only used for content creation and discovery?
@steevc(80)· 2660d
Some change to the curve and posting/curation split may help matters, but it should not penalise small accounts too much. We know the orcas and whales do well from curation. Then again the system should discourage creating masses of small accounts. It's a tricky one to get right and you will never please everyone. Maybe it could be a variable system that adapts to deal whatever ways people try to game it, but then there will be lots of strategies going on.

One thing that should change is that rep should go up slower if all votes come from the same few accounts. We have people with really high rep just from buying votes, so it is meaningless.
@danmaruschak(76)· 2660d
I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the best strategy to get curation rewards is to "bet on" posts from people who already have a track record of having popular posts. If this is true then it's not clear to me that this works well as "proof of brain" so I'm not sure it makes sense to devote more rewards to it, especially at the cost of rewarding creators. Is there evidence that careful, thoughtful, content-based curation "works better" than dumb algorithms like voting for posts from accounts with good track records?

If the goal is to improve the incentive structure on the blockchain to encourage people to manually search for good posts based on their content then it isn't clear to me that this proposal does that. For one thing, since the share of curation rewards you get are still tied to impact of your vote most people won't see very big curation rewards since most users of the site don't have large amounts of SP. If the reward for identifying an awesome post is still tiny for the majority of users isn't it bad ROI for them to put in the effort? Or is the idea to try to incentivize big accounts to curate?
@dalz(81)· 2660d
I'm AGAINST all of the propsed changes. On the author/curation split just make a slider in the range 60/40 to 100/0.... for flexibilitie.
@igster(63)· 2660d

We cannot eliminate such behavior entirely, but we can make it less economically viable.

100% this. We have to take steps to shape the system in a way where even the greediest of people will have to act in ways that benefit the whole ecosystem rather than slowly milking it to its death and forcing everyone else to either follow suit or feel like they're being left behind and wasting time when others are just aiming to maximize their own short term profits with minimal effort(read: zero)! I'd guess it doesn't take long for people to change camps, I know I'm selling almost 100% of my votes now after vocally being against bidbots since the day they appeared. I've read from all over the place here on Steem, how active members are sad that they aren't actively curating anymore. I know how that feels, I'm a bit gutted as well, this isn't the Steem we were promised at all. And if you're asking why these people don't just curate, what's stopping them, you might want to spend some time pondering how this current situation affects individuals over a long period of time. I've been active Steem member for around 2 years now and I've regularly browsed the trending, it's never been stellar but back then it was other members voting for people rather than literally anyone being able to buy the top spots (these days this is required actually) without any community support or content discovery happening. We're being shoved bad content down our throats... As you can imagine, I'm not checking Trending daily anymore.

We've all heard the saying one bad apple spoils the whole barrel, and we're seeing that in full action here on Steem. Majority of stake is selling their votes passively, content discovery is minimal and manual curation just isn't happening because it isn't worth it. Just look at our "trending", is it something to be proud of or does it show that proof-of-brain exists on this platform, like at all, and that should be our main attraction! (See reddit as an example here).

I'm not sure about anyone else here, but I'd like to one day use Trending to actually see the best content submitted to our blockchain, that's actually worth reading and sharing to others (read: interesting, quality content rather than just another ad or an attempt by the author to benefit from their readers in some way).

If we can't accomplish a trending that's actually attractive to outside visitors, this place is doomed in the end. I could go on and on why this is so important but system that's fair will attract people over something that is not. Steem has always had a hard time representing itself as a fair system, fixing these issues would help us immensely in building our reputation back up again (It's never been high, let's fix that).

Seeing all the changes Eli has done and her leadership makes me hopeful, this post is showing that you guys are ready to truly lead this ship and I really like that. We've needed a captain since Dan left!

This isn't the first lengthy post from me on this issue, and probably won't be last either as long as I own some Steem and care about the future of this decentralized social media platform.

Let's make Steem great again!
@lunaticpandora(70)· 2660d
Interesting proposals, Looking forward to what comes out of these discussions!
@toofasteddie(77)· 2660d
I would like to read more information about the first proposal, seems interesting. The other 2 for me are irrelevant

Posted using Partiko iOS
@artopium(67)· 2660d
Alternatively, users could choose to act more subtly by spreading stake across more, but smaller, votes at the cost of a suboptimal return. We cannot eliminate such behavior entirely, but we can make it less economically viable.

See, the problem is one of perspective. One cannot have a totally decentralized and censorship free platform that grants monetary incentives (the whole purpose of using a blockchain, right?) AND control what people do with it, including spam, bid bots and the rest. To me, this is how I know it's a platform of freedom and NOT one of Facebook-like totalitarianism. I want to see some abuse take place, and I want to see community action solve it, like in many cases in Steemit's past. Not some core team of developers, who should step away from the politics of steemit, and be more concerned writing press releases about how the Steem blockchain is even more decentralized (like, way more than 19-top-witnesses decentralized).

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@hotsauceislethal(66)· 2660d
I was literally just talking about this on my discord chat with @canna-curate members.

The whole platform is economically incentivized and this creates an environment where users simply want to game the system for max reward. This is clearly not how the platform was intended to be used but there is no way to completely prevent abuses and loopholes. We can only work to minimize or disincentivize this kind of behavior.

One of the biggest things I have noticed is the lack of genuine user interaction in favor of autovoting and spammy comment farming. People have found ways to receive the reward without having to do any of the work involved in participating actively.
@inertia(75)· 2660d

By the way, the whole point of communities (backed by SMTs) was to avoid the need for STEEM itself to implement "what if" scenarios.
@joshman(74)· 2660d
You could also consult with economists...
@krnel(80)· 2660d

Moving from a linear rewards curve to a convergent linear rewards curve.

Wha tis the threshold, Is there an example of how this would work? It's pretty vague.

This essentially empowers the popular accounts to get more rewards because they get more votes, while those who are less popular will get less rewards than they do now since only hiugh SP superlinear voting can give them significant rewards at a lower vote count.

Coupled with changes to curation which is to motivate people to curate through financial incentives, the way curation is done is already highly geared towards financial incentives, i.e. people are motivated/incentivized to vote in order to get curation rewards by voting for posts that get higher rewards.

When you reduce the curation rewards that will be obtained by voting for content that is not highly rewarded, this motivates more people to the incentive to vote for the popular highly rewarded accounts (more so than now). If they vote as they do now on less popular content, they will get less curation rewards. They will thus be more inventivized to go vote for more popular content in order to match the the relative curation rewards they used to get. Unless the curation reward increase is enough to offset this, those who vote on less popular posts will see less curation rewards due to the superlinear rewards allocation. But even then, the more popular posts will generate even more curaiton rewards compared to less popular posts.

The more powerful accounts will have more influence over who is rewarded through superlinear voting. Finding or rewarding "quality content" will be determined by the "whale" class once again. Or by the new "whales", the vote selling bots and their vote buyers. You won't need quantity of upvotes when you can just buy a vote. Won't this increase more authors to buy votes since they will be getting less rewards with the curation reward increase and the superlinear reward change?

Curation rewards are nill to most users until they have enough SP. That's the majority of users. Those who beenfit the most from higher curation are the higher SP accounts.

Didn't Ned speak in favor of vote selling in the past? If this is a problem as mentioned above about passive delegation to bidbots, why isn't that being targeted directly?

Vote selling and buying will still be around with all these changes, and those who buy votes buy the packing on of votes (quantity), which this quoted change will simply increase their rewards. Meanwhile, the people who aren't buying votes will have less rewards go to them through reward pool allocation.

If implemented, will any of these changes possibly be reversed? If so, what will determine if they are to be reversed? What will determine if it is a success and should stay?

Create a separate “downvote pool.”

I don't agree. Some don't have any issue flagging people because they don't like the author or their posts. Rewarding this behavior simply incentivizes more malicious behavior, as they will be rewarded for doing it.

All these changes will likely be implemented anyways, despite objections about the negatives they can (or will) bring. I hope changing things back can be done quicker if the negatives happen. Though changing things back hasn't been something done quickly on Steem before, so I doubt that will be the case. Has anything ever been changed back before?...
@paradigm42(60)· 2660d
How about just limiting self voting by making it cost far more in RCs and or limiting how many times an account can self vote in 24 hours. Please do not make so there is even less motivation to produce quality content by taking an even larger % of content creator profits than is already in place..
@misterakpan(62)· 2660d
Someone mistakenly turned on the "Listen to Community" switch at the office? Trafalgar almost came off as real genius there, only that these are discussions I have seen a lot of Steemians try to raise for much of the past year. Silver lining: some progress there because we finally found an oracle to approach the gods through.
@whatsup(76)· 2660d
I do not support all three of these things together. While I might be able to support higher curation rewards, I do not see this as the most important element to work on at this time and I do not want to see SteemIt, Inc's dev team pulled off of SMTs and other work that ads appeal to those outside of our community.

Curation is a large account game, it means very little to most of our users.

We had everything in this mix before and it didn't matter. minus a downvote pool. The big accounts just followed Authors they thought would be successful and upvoted them for rewards. There wasn't any curation in it the first go around either.
@bluerobo(70)· 2660d
I have never heard anybody complaining about the costs or lack of incentives associated with down voting...

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@newageinv(74)· 2660d
These will be interesting conversations to have!

!dramatoken

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@clumsysilverdad(65)· 2660d
@xpose(36)· 2660d
This is IRONY at its best. I can't believe that I am reading this on official blog of Steemit. There is talk about 'Improving Content Discovery' and Steemit is considering proposal of @trafalgar.(Really!!!)

Have you guys checked his alt account which goes by @traf and his self upvoting for past 30 days? And he basically just posts shit there and even self-upvotes his comments too.
@prakashghai(64)· 2660d
I believe the markets have turned and we are in a new crypto bull market, also competition will likely increase in the near future, therefore these proposals should be implemented ASAP !
@mexbit(61)· 2660d
Why do you not work on SMTs???! Discuss this again when SMTs are out completely.

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Comments · 91

The future? A few whales voting each other on his empty post.

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Question To Steemit Inc

In February 2017 Steemit Inc re-highlighted why linear rewards are fundamentally flawed, yet they never retracted their statement before pushing for linear rewards to be implemented.

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