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Hello Steemians, I’m @vandeberg, Senior Blockchain Engineer at Steemit and today I want to do a more technical deep dive in to the proposed downvote pool in the Steem EIP. One of the core tenants of Steem is the belief in the wisdom of the crowd to curate and reward good content. The current economic model limits every account's ability to earn by a resource called "voting mana". Whenever your vote, whether it be an upvote, downvote, or changing your vote, some of this voting mana is used up. When it is all gone, your votes no longer impact rewards.
Of these three actions, only one of them rewards the user, upvoting. Neither changing your vote nor downvoting can reward you. It then makes sense that if you greedily optimize your return on investment, you would only upvote content as downvoting it would be a waste of your precious voting mana.
However, downvoting is an integral piece of the curation process. An ideal solution would incentivize downvoting with rewards, but we have yet to come up with a solution that is fair and not exploitable. In the meantime, we believe allowing users to have some downvotes without consuming their voting mana is a reasonable solution. While it does not incentivize curating through downvotes, it removes the direct cost of downvoting, which should make downvoting a more economically viable option.
What we propose to do is to create a separate downvote pool that can contain its own mana up to some percentage of the mana that the upvote pool can contain. Downvotes will be taken from the downvote pool first, and then the upvote pool once the downvote pool has been consumed. The downvote pool will follow the same rules as the upvote pool, regenerating over five days and filling instantly and proportionally to new Steem Power and delegations.
We think having a downvote pool that is 10-25% the size of the voting mana pool would serve as a good starting point. The good way to think of this is that a certain number of downvotes are free before you are charged for downvoting. Charged only in the sense that you are losing potential rewards you could have gotten from upvoting. That number needs to be high enough to make a difference, but not too high that it becomes exploitable.
The obvious alternative solution is to have two entirely separate pools for upvotes and downvotes. We believe this is a bad idea because it would allow the reward system to devolve into a zero sum game without consequence. Each account could award and remove an equal number of reward shares to content. If everyone did this, then no content would have any reward shares and would then not get any reward.
Furthermore, there are users out there that understand this change is adding resources for them to use and will use whatever resources they have available. A downvote against someone else is a small upvote for everyone else. We expect some users will use all their downvotes to maximize their returns. In an effort to curb that behavior, we are recommending to not create a full separate pool.
This hybrid approach captures the best of both approaches. It does not give too many additional resources to users that will use/abuse all that we give them and frees up normal users that may not be downvoting to do so without financial penalty.
Let me know if you have any questions in the comments section below, or if there is another aspect of the blockchain that I should explore next.
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@baah | May 24, 2019, 11:07 p.m. | Votes: 3 | [
VOTE ]
Well maybe now you would. Maybe now when you see something you don't like, either because it's getting to much reward, or because you don't think it should be rewarded at, all, then you can do something about it without sacrificing your votes. I know, most people will respond with "if you don't like it then move along" but that is exactly why we have flags, not to step around the feces but to do something about it. Being silent about it or ignoring it will only send the message that feces is fine. I see these new changes as wholy essential, and wonder how we lasted so long this far. For one, the curve was overpowering but it was essentially because it made splitting your stake up a very very poor choice (@edicted still thinks that the curve encourages stake splitting and sybil attacks, talk about Giant Facepalm). With the curve two things can happen: first calculating the ROI from delegations on bidbots becomes very difficult if not impossible since the factor of what order the delegations come in messes what otherwise is a simple function, and next, delegations to things that don't worry or work on returning revenue will be empowered by the stake concentration/curve, so that for example combating abuse with steem flag rewards becomes more effective and this comes into play even more with the free downvotes and at the same time the freezepeach account can also more effectively be used to heal content that was flagged. What I am interested in is if we can delegate our free downvotes to such projects, as that would endlessly empower the community to fight all kinds of abuse.
I have DV most recently the troll fag @kawiicrush and before that the idiot @funtimebobby52. I don't have a problem with downvotes/flags, to me these things are essential in aligning incentives, without the threat of dv I really think that this place would not exit, it would have fizzled out after the self voting was so pervasive that the vast majority was doing it.
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I'm not in support or opposition to the proposal, but I have feedback...
(i) "Let's try it and see what happens" may not be the ideal methodology, and I'm not sure that it demonstrates a sufficient level of fiduciary responsibility for a blockchain with a $120 million market cap.
(ii) Mathematically, there must be a positive-value voting scheme that's functionally equivalent to one that involves voting with negative votes. Or at least one that deescalates the flag wars, rather than providing them with more fuel.
(iii) Something modeled after second price auctions might serve the dual-purposes of discouraging votes that overvalue a post (whether self-vote, collusive voting, or for any other reason), and also disencentivizing downvotes that are wildly out of step with the community.
(iv) If implemented, how long is everything going to be stalled waiting for the rewards pools to return to equilibrium?
(v) Is there any quantitative evidence to suggest that the proposal is better than the status quo?
@baah | May 24, 2019, 10:36 p.m. | Votes: 7 | [
VOTE ]
First no single entity has any feduciary responsibility for the blockchain, everyone is either holding stake or isn't, those with stake cannot be said to have such a role over the blockchain but what can be suggested is that in safeguarding their stake/investment they are incentivized to maintain such a role, although indirectly. I wouldn't call it 'let's try it and see what happens' but frankly that is exactly how science of all manners is conducted. The hypothesis is clear: free downvotes will lead to people using the downvotes to combat abuse and encourage self policing, we are trying to see what free downvotes would do and why they would work is very sound and well reasoned: at the moment it make no sense for individuals to spend their resources on fighting abuse when they could focus them on endlessly more rewarding things.
Flag wars, much like self voting cannot be countered through code changes. This has been considered probably from before steem was even a solid idea and AFAIK there has not been any code changes that were suggested that weren't mere hurdles and caused negative behavior to be more obscure and thus harder to detect and that much more difficult to combat.
We don't have any evidence because we have no experience, to gain experience we must try things, we might brake them but we will always learn, regardless if it's a poor decision or a good one, but if we don't try, if we don't take the leap, we won't know.
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The collective body that's deciding which version of code to run has a fiduciary responsibility. To some extent, that includes everyone, but in reality, it's a relatively small group of people.
You can't know with certainty what will happen without trying it, but you can gain an increased level of confidence by doing formal analysis of the change, and developing research-backed theories that are more reliable than our intuitions. You can also increase your level of confidence by running simulations.
> Flag wars, much like self voting cannot be countered through code changes
Where is the evidence for this? If self-voting can't be countered through code changes, there's no point in implementing the change. As suggested in item (iii), however, I suspect that they actually can be mitigated by realigning the voting incentives.
@baah | May 25, 2019, 12:16 a.m. | Votes: 1 | [
VOTE ]
They don't have any such responsibility, what they are responsible for is running the nodes/servers and updating the price feed (ugh), all else is a matter of desire not of necessity.
I don't understand what you want me to provide since you seem to want me to demonstrate a negative proof. There have been a lot of suggestions and, much like your 2nd price action, they weren't considered fully in how a bad actor would overcome them. In the end, they all have one common thread: tax/burden the community and obfuscate undesirable behavior, unwittingly. You seem to think that by splitting stake up to jump over the hurdle is making abuse more obvious, but frankly I don't know how you can reason that, how it's easier to link multiple accounts together in a scheme than to simply recognize one abusive account.
Again, the way to realign incentives is not through Law but the enforcement of law, likewise, the flag enforces the law of "thou shall not voturbate" because implementing any such law is only at the expense of everyone who doesn't abuse self voting and it barely can be considered a hurdle to those determined to do the least for the most.
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I don't want you to provide anything, and I'm not the one that needs to be convinced. I'm content with either decision. I'm saying that the people who decide which version of code to run should demand more than an intuitive demonstration that the change will make things better.
What does better mean? In curation, "better" means that it is more likely to rank a set of posts in the correct order, according to user preferences. So, it seems to me that the witnesses who will run the code should ask whoever is proposing the change to provide some level of evidence that the post ranking after the change is likely to be more correct (closer to matching user preferences) than post ranking before the change.
> Again, the way to realign incentives is not through Law but the enforcement of law
Your argument seems self-contradictory. On one hand, you say that the rules don't matter - and we need to just depend on curators to downvote, but you're making that argument in support of a rule change. If we can't solve the problem of incorrect ranking of posts by changing the rules of the game, then why are we having this conversation at all?
@baah | May 25, 2019, 2:03 a.m. | Votes: 2 | [
VOTE ]
They aren't asking for any demonstration because there is no testing or scoring for such a demonstration, the only way to get data, the. Only. Way. Is to try it.
Curation isn't what you make it out to be by far, it's another word for saying review / rate. That's it. It's not about correct or incorrect ordering, it's about "I rate this as x dollars". After all let's not kid ourselves that we are curators at a natural history museum or the like...
What this proposal is about is not "fixing curation" but incentivizing policing the network, making it not profitable to self vote, bid bot, or circle jerk, make it cost little to nothing to counter plagiarism / fraud etc..
You're asking for some level of evidence that this proposal is going to make users more likely to rank a set of posts in a correct order but the preposterous notion isn't only that this proposal is not about that or that there aren't any metrics to measure "a correct order to user preference" (kinda oxymoron, as preference and correct are contradictory ideas, one is objective t/f and binary correct or incorrect, the other is subjective and variable) but that there isn't any place or system that could be used to determine that besides steem.
My argument is not that rules don't matter, I'm saying that having rules without enforcement is redundant, and putting it into code only burdens everyone, much like your suggestion, while those that seek the least amount of work for the most profit will exploit it either way, if they have to go around the obstacles you place they will. By allowing people to enforce rules that needent be even expressed or explained but are simply "unwritten" (ie George Carlin's unwritten rules of the road) then you don't have to deal with figuring out exactly who is who as they are going around your obstacles. I hope it makes sense, I'm sure there are others who could better explain the conundrum.
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>"...Flag wars, much like self voting cannot be countered through code changes."
This is objectively false. Flags can just be omitted via code. Votes altogether can just be omitted via code.
Code is infinitely immutable, and good code can fix every problem bad code creates.
Unfortunately, we're throwing more bad code after bad code, and the problems we already suffer are going to get worse as soon as these code changes are implemented. Incentive to imbue Steem with value isn't effected via extant code, and the tweaks discussed are just going to make that worse, and that's all because the devs either aren't experienced investors, or aren't interested in imbuing Steem with value.
Code currently encourages stakeholders to strip value from Steem by extracting rewards via unlimited upvotes, delegation, etc. Code can change that.
But it won't, because profiteers were encouraged to profit, and presently control the lion's share of stake, and they don't want to change the status quo. Every time disruption occurs, it costs stakeholders profiting from extant conditions.
After these tweaks are implemented and things get worse, feel free to comment to me regarding my comments that that is what will happen. Don't think you will, but feel free to.
The challenge with rewarding downvotes is partially in the fact that it is so easy to reward upvotes. If a piece of content gets paid a certain amount, then part of those rewards are shared with the curators. In essence, it is a profit sharing model the rewards earlier upvotes that theoretically took more risk on upvoting than later voters. It is easy to quantify if the upvote was worth it based on the resulting payout.
How do you quantify the success of a downvote? If it made sense to concentrate downvotes on bad content, then you could reward those downvotes in a similar fashion to upvotes. But then you run in to the awkward question of how you would reward an upvote on content that made 0 STEEM. It doesn't make sense that you would reward the upvote. After all, the community determined the content was worthless. Why would you reward someone for thinking the content was valuable? That situation highlights the intuition we have when the rules are mirrored that somehow get lost when we look at a downvote in a sea of upvotes. We are open to suggestions on how downvotes might be rewarded and agree that it would be the ideal solution. Our goal with the EIP is not to nail down the ideal, but simply and carefully move closer to it, one step at a time.
Regarding second price auctions, the idea is interesting, but sadly there are simple behaviors that will get around it. If the highest vote gets thrown out, then I will split my stake among more accounts and continue self voting. Then only a fraction of my stake would get ignored via the second price auction rules. Your simulated results are better than expected because they don't account from any emergent behavior as a result of the change. This is one of the biggest challenges faced by the scientific community with regards to social sciences. I appreciate that you are thinking through these problems as well and trying to come up with solutions!
@baah | May 25, 2019, 4:18 p.m. | Votes: 0 | [
VOTE ]
No not like it is the same thing at all, only to point out that flagging has been used and is still used for the betterment of the network. Your strawman that I argued at all like it's the same thing does nothing. You asked what the benefits were, and when given the obvious would be benefits you moved the goalposts, you argue that "quality shmality", well tough titties bro but since you have nothing to retort as to the benefits then move along. You keep wanting to make it seem that flagging, 95% as you so valiantly pulled out of thin air, is "personal" and that all of a sudden because people have some free flags they will turn on each other as if they lost all senses. No, you're ENORMOUSLY mistaken, Flagging is vastly used not for personal attacks but for policing the network. There is literally One Rouge whale, @berniesanders, who flags wanton but it's negligible at best.
https://steemit.com/steem/@abh12345/have-there-been-more-downvotes-since-the-button-was-relabeled-and-moved#@abh12345/ps2frj
Stop literally expecting people to act without reason or sense and completely vicious, vindictive and predatory, and stop painting thousands of people with the same brush that is worthy of the two resident faggots, FULLTIMEFAG and IhavenofriendspleaseacceptmeSanders.
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Well, there are objective parameters by which you can determine that.
I could give you a dozen examples.
Photography, art, music. There are objective parameters in each category that determine what is quality and what is not.
Even when concerning quality of text....
But thats not the question really. What i find important is the CHOICE...
The most important change Steem needs is that we introduce choice into our content placement.
Maybe the community is stupid and has a shitty taste in content but it should be able to make that choice for itself. Something which it does not right now.
>There is no way downvotes will be used responsibly which more than negates any possible benefits.
But here i completely agree. If there was a way to mask who the downvoter is on a post that would do the trick.
Then you would actually see people acting the way they should. Based on their personal convictions.
If you could encrypt, somehow, the downvoter on a post i guarantee you that bad apples like Bernie, FTG, chbartist... etc would be booted off the platform by the time the community realizes that the system works... I would bet every penny of crypto i have that would happen.
Unfortunately it wont and youre left with an idea that only works if youre incapable of assessing human behavior.
@baah | May 26, 2019, 4:32 a.m. | Votes: 1 | [
VOTE ]
O please, I literally tagged that faggot @berniesanders about a dozen or so times and he has flagged me a bunch of times. And you know what, I never whined, I not once argued that 'this is the end of steem' and I was never PERTURBED by getting flagged. In fact if you go back you can see me getting flagged and ignoring it, commenting like I wasn't getting automatically flagged and actually a lot of time it would tickle me so much I'd mock it by saying that my comments are getting mystified. Shut the fuck up with your whining nonsense and 'O no, the flags are hurting me' fucking pathetic excuses and you call yourself 'freedom of speech' you fucking hack.
Do you see the fucking comment you responded to you God damn fucking pleab of a peasant, you had nothing to say to it, only to alarm and virtue signal, fucking despicable.
Shove that fucking quote down your throat or suck on it, I don't wanna see your fuckface around. I don't know who told you we are friends or you could respond to mme with such insinuating bullshit but it certainly wasn't me or anything I said. I fucking can't wait for all you fucktard faggot to flee this nazi loving place.
Heil Hitler and kiss my hary ass or whatever the fuck you believe,
Fa k
Incoherent idiots. Fuck me I'd be glad only when I shut you all up, make me happy. Literally going to meditate in my dream about fucking your skull.
It's not that downvoting doesn't have downsides, they are considerable. It's just that without a modest amount of free downvotes, we don't really have a realistic chance of turning this place around at all.
Currently, we're paying content indifferent voting behavior (self vote, vote selling) 4x more than curation. When we bump curation to 50%, there's still a 2x gap. The modest amount of free downvotes are further designed to bridge that gap.
I'm one of the ones who recommended these specific numbers for the EIP and I can tell you I'm very aware for the adverse effects. Let's say that at any given time, under the EIP they'll be around 5,000,000 SP worth of whales consistently being abusive with their downvotes on purpose. 25% of that is 1.25m SP out there making everyone's lives miserable.
Now look at the flip side, instead of next to nothing, if everything works out, you could have 100m SP worth of upvotes being cast in a relatively honest way that is reflecting their appraisal of the content. And half that money will be finding its way into the pockets of good content creators.
Maybe my numbers are a little optimistic, especially the latter, but overall it seems like a good trade off. We can't focus too much on the negatives alone without looking at the positives.
@jaki01 | May 26, 2019, 9:42 p.m. | Votes: 1 | [
VOTE ]
> Unjustified whale flags are going to happen with or without free downvotes.
Crimes will happen with or without police ... Nevertheless I think it's good to have one ...
> Sure, they get a little more juice proportionally, but I don't think of it as breaking
In my eyes it's already now way too much. I know people who left STEEM because of unjustified (at least in their eyes) flags, and I know people who didn't want to join after observing how people got flagged (often in an automated way) only because they spoke out their opinion.
(Just see how many comments under this article were flagged again ...)
> ... (and it's also in fact why the % is not as high as what some people have been pushing for, which is 100%).
... and I already wrote that I think the 'hybrid solution' would cause less damage than two completely separated pools.
> The downvote committee can happen today. Don't see what's stopping it. Good luck convincing enough people though.
It won't happen if not supported by someone with a huge amount of SP (for example with a delegation of Steemit, Inc.).
Otherwise it's members either wouldn't dare to flag accounts with much SP or didn't care to write here anymore anyway.
@jaki01 | May 27, 2019, 12:09 a.m. | Votes: 11 | [
VOTE ]
> I'll go look for your thing, but this isn't two separate pools (since that is yet another idea).
Maybe your hybrid has the same problem, maybe not.
Actually, it's @vandeberg's "hybrid" I am talking about (he is using this term in his article). I think his hybrid solution is better than two separate pools of equal size, but I am still not sure if it will have a positive effect.
> Edit: oh, in fact that's what you were proposing. I misread the first time sorry :)
No problem at all, I like your constructive way of discussing!
In case you are interested, you may (or have already?) read "My STEEM Vision.", where I illustrated my points of views more extensively. Then, even if you may not agree with every of my suggestions and ideas, at least you understand where I am coming from.
Good to hear about your downvote reversal committee (I didn't know about it, as I am not very often following the Discord discussions because my time is limited, and also English isn't my mother tongue) ... but isn't the problem that without significant SP you (the members of the committee) can become 'whale victims', as well?
I am not sure that bid bots are really a problem aside from creating envy. Someone's 2 minute blog of junk may earn 1000x more than an 8 hour blog of well researched findings, and of course there is a risk that anyone who bids too much could be crushed by a whale and lose their investment-while the bid bots still benefits. The few whales who come in the name of fairness wanting to help crush the bid bots I doubt will achieve the results they want. It may prove just to be the death knell to the block chain and their own investments.
I am not sure how this help makes things more fair if the bid bots disappear [supposing the price and floating circulation of steem remained unaffected, which it wouldn't], those of us who don't use them will still get about the same amount of votes and earnings.
Those who operate the bid bots, I presume, are keeping a big chunk of the Steem out of circulation. To shut them down would likely cause these bidbot owners to dump their Steem and flood the marketplace...for 13 weeks. If there is a mass dump it is going to hurt steem as an investment....for 13 weeks. One can't blame the people who have started to powerdown, it's is going to likely make steem extremely cheap to buy in the future for the companies failure to protect market value. Maybe this is what the whales want is to buy more on the cheap and have an even greater influence. The abusive whales, who likewise can buy more at a discount, will try to purge more and more people from the platform for an ideological differences causing them to be a greater problem than they are now. Sure the little guys could buy more too, but the little guys aren't earning 6 figures a year and could still be swallowed whole by the abusive whales off the platform. Even if an ordinary person had $10000 extra to spend during the crash, steem would be too much risk as an investment and depending on how low steemit went when they bought in they could still be swallowed whole by an abusive whale. For people in the 3rd world, they stand even less of a chance.
There are threats on the horizon; What steem cofounder Dan (Now of EOS and MEOS )says can kill steemit. Who knows if there is any truth to what Dan says, other than the current [lack of] leadership of steem. If the [lack of] leadership allows such changes to destroy the market value of steem, the MEOS (or whatever it is called) can ensure that by buying enough steem at a discounted rate they can destroy steem's primary utility internally and basically kill steemit.
You make a lot of assumptions as to what a bad comment is. There is already Whales with a network of bots that target people with certain ideas, every time they post, every time they comment. We see a couple of the people affected already commenting within the posts.
Rewarding downvotes isn't a very bright thing to do with the president ready to regulate social media companies, and as facebook and others are meddling in European Elections....and we might see a bit of that here on the steem block chain.
While I haven't been the target of these bots [gulp, yet]. What we aren't seeing is the purging of bad ideas, but the purging of political expression upon ideological lines-classic content based discrimination. If president Trump pushes an online internet bill of rights, I don't think your company is quite prepared to deal with first amendment issues if you think a vote is sufficient. Afterall, the Greeks voted to ostracize Aristades the just for 10 years. And here the decision to ostracize are weighted in a light favorable to those with the biggest money.
To counter these downvotes, some users may have to spend upwards of $1000 (in some cases tens of thousands)...just to break even against these bots...so their posts appears on the main steemit site with images and text...which defeats much of the marketing and incentive behind steem. It is just easier, and in many cases they do, just quit the platform and that hurts the community more.
You guys are struggling to grow in the marketplace as social media giants are purging their users and as they and others are fleeing elsewhere. And instead of welcoming in new users, you continuously harm the community with your laughable ideas at how to make the platform better.
You may simple wish to recognize certain bots that deal with plagiarism/obscenity issues such as cheetah or steemitcleaners can do harmful downvotes for cleaning up the chain, but you may want to completely abolish the downvote option for other users.
Also, how about editing steemit so that the tags we use automatically go into the meta tags so we can benefit from SEO searches. Make it some people browsing the web can find the content we post. Trying to enhance the user experience, trying to grow the number of users, trying to expand user interaction should be the focus-not pissing the existing community off.
No, There is no mana, like there is no steempower.
There are vests and resource credits. When I vote I lose voting power and resource credits. Both are used to limit my ability to receive vests as rewards proportional aligned with how much vests I have as steempower.
Steem is deposited in the steem vesting fund. The only way in is to buy steem with fiat. When you power up the steem is put in the steem vesting fund and you receive your share of vests as steempower.
SBD is a convertible note, a promise to receive 1 USD worth of steem out of the steem vesting fund through conversion. The steem is still locked in the steem vesting fund. hint
If I choose 100% payout you receive vests, if you choose 50%-50% you receive vests and a promise(SBD).
The costs are "resource credits" proportional aligned with how much vests I own.
Through the use of dynamic fractional reserves we all pay for transaction costs.
It limits the ability to receive rewards.
A user would have to earn rewards at an 8.45% rate to combat (inflation/dilution) just to break even after paying for these transaction costs...
Read the fuk-king whitepaper. :)
It would depend on how many people downvoted the individual post.
A 100 steem post would get chopped down to 50 if it’s the self voter and the downvoter. 33 on the second downvote. 25 on the third. 20 on the fourth.
We’re talking about curation, right? A bad post should get multiple downvotes if people take the job seriously.
If you have a post at 100 Steem and there is an upvote/downvote split at 50/50 with 100 voters, the reward is only 50. In this case, something else is happening because curation will tilt heavily for or against a post.
If the votes are not heavily skewed, then it’s likely a vote war. The one person one vote for downvotes method would ensure that the creator doesn’t walk away empty-handed.
It would also discourage team votes. If your upvotes are worth $1 at 100%, but you’re trying to help your friend by upvoting his lame post, a downvote would cut your share too.
It has to hurt the bad content creator and also the accomplices.
On the other side, if it’s good content with lots of upvotes, let’s say 50 upvotes, then losing 1/51 of the reward for one downvote would be negligible. It protects genuinely good content.
Whereas ownership downvotes strongly favor big accounts. A popular post with 100 upvotes can be zeroed our by one big account. There is no protection for genuinely good work.
Upvotes by ownership. Downvotes by percent of votes.
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@smooth | May 25, 2019, 8:09 p.m. | Votes: 2 | [
VOTE ]
It will be at least months before SMTs are ready (I don't know the schedule for communities) and even then will likely be additional months or years if ever before any SMT becomes large and valuable enough for such a test to be meaningful at all, and even then it won't be clear whether such results would scale up to the entire Steem platform. For the foreseeable future the primary concentration of value on Steem will be the STEEM token and therefore the native Steem reward pool will be the primary motivator of voting behavior.
Honestly, SMTs and communities were a bit of a scam sold to us by Steemit as being something that: a) going to be was finished in a reasonable time, b) would instantly power all sorts of large and valuable projects which don't currently exist, and c) would successfully compete with countless other existing and in-development token systems in the blockchain world. Maybe (b) and (c) would have had a better chance had (a) actually occurred, but it didn't.
To be clear I think SMTs and communities are fine and I'll welcome them when the come but they aren't even close to a panacea to solve all of Steem's problems the way many seem to suggest (nor do we have even the remotest idea when they will actually exist).
> takes so long to implement changes?
There are efforts under way to attempt to improve this as well. We'll see. But I'm not in favor of putting all eggs in the SMT basket for sure. I'd rather take advantage of all of the available opportunties to try to move forward.
@smooth | May 25, 2019, 8:53 p.m. | Votes: 3 | [
VOTE ]
The goal is to address the failures of the reward pool to serve its intended function, which is to attract and reward those who add value to Steem, and to also serve as a content discovery mechanism which makes Steem/it attractive to general web traffic and recruits more users into the economy.
What we have seen over time is a spiraling downward as the alexa rank of steemit.com has dropped (so fewer people are even seeing it, likely due to the shit content that is posted and 'promoted'), along with the price of Steem and its ranking and visiblity to cryptocurrency investors who might buy it. And at the same time, the reward pool mechanism has been undermined by rampant milking which (along with the price) has been the main reason that hardly anyone can earn any meaningful rewards (without buying them, which doesn't count), and also the main reason why there is less highly-attractive content and poor content discovery, leading to a decline in general web traffic and potential growth (because, after all, if there is nothing but garbage here, or at least nothing but garbage that is easy to find, why would there be any general web traffic).
As I alluded to earlier, there are numerous parallel efforts to address Steem's stagnation and decline, as well as the slow pace of progress on any and every effort that might do so. One of those is SPS (DAO), which is intended to provide funding to numerous decentralized efforts (development, marketing, promotion, etc.) where Steemit Inc. has not been knocking it out of the park to say the least. Another one is the revamp of the reward pool mechanism, of which enhanced downvotes are an essential part. The development team working to reduce the cost of hard forks is yet another. And perhaps also SMTs and communities, someday, if the slow pace and mixed quality of development from our one centralized and shrinking development team is finally able to pull it off.
I do not know and I can not guarantee that any or all of these will actually work and pull Steem/it out of decline, but I think they are credible, sincere efforts, and I do know that we absolutely need to try or the tailspin will only continue.
@baah | May 26, 2019, 12:23 a.m. | Votes: 1 | [
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Yes most people were up in arms about it, yet the experiment was meant to last a couple of weeks and it extended for a couple of months if not more and numerous people who were against it changed their tune mere days later. Your confirmation bias is showing btw:
https://steemit.com/whale-experiment/@benjojo/the-whale-experiment-orca-support
There are more I'm sure but I literally picked the first one (after I typed the quip about confirmation bias to you) out of the results:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Whale+experiment+steemit&ia=web
I told you to look back, I didn't say look only for what tickles your bias. In that thread I linked I'm right there in the comments commending the efforts of both abit and smooth and spelling out why it is a success, but it was a success because it empowered people and because it demonstrated that the large stakeholders aren't idiots and understand why people want to power up, and it's not when they see reward pool rape and such faggotries. I wasn't the only one, I'm positive that every single one were adamantly against it completely changed their tune days later, and I knew that because I was there and read their comments and posts.
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@baah | May 26, 2019, 2:01 a.m. | Votes: 1 | [
VOTE ]
The hardfork stopped the curve distribution which was supposed to "fix" distribution. This is why convergent is brought up, because it didn't fix it.
I won't argue with you about the control over development but at the same time they aren't in "control" of the blockchain. Open source and the incredible development that is taking place on top of it also and the efforts that happen from the stakeholders (like the unprecedented whale experiment) demonstrates that.
Everyone who is ready to vilify the whales, or to suggest that people are totally the worst, giving them any kind of power they will abuse it, the majority, that's is nonsense and counter intuitive to what people really are like. Like I pointed out, ain't no police force that can stop a lynch mob, and you better believe that the police are people too, who all too often abuse their power, IMO much much more than they use it carefully or reserved (or in their capacity) and if you read the Declaration of Independence you'd no doubt have to contend with what it says about people tolerating the intolerable, people are generally good, and forgive grave injustices and help and engage in self sacrifice, and yes, the whales are generally wise enough to recognize what is helping the platform and themselves in turn and what isn't. Yet that isn't dramatic, that isn't exciting, that's not controversial, it's rather dull and unsophisticated. Well suck mah balls either way, what you believe ain't my concern in the faking slightest.
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Why are you telling these stories rather than showing data? If someone makes a proposal, they have to back it up with data, no?
If you do your homework - define your success metrics and gather the data and show it to the community - you will get immediate agreement, don't you think?
If you don't have the research or data skills to do this, ask for assistance. Many will be happy to help, myself included. We have some excellent statisticians doing good work. You can also check out this post for some ideas for success metrics.
More science, less arguing for the validity of your logic and telling stories to convince others.
What is a big problem with a more scientific approach as I'm suggesting? @vandeberg mentioned that the social sciences have been struggling due to the complexity they are dealing with and difficulty in controlling for variables. However, this can be overcome with appropriate methodology and research and data skills. Books such as Lean Analytics lay out many of the aspects in detail.
If you don't want to do science, fine, but the probability of things going wrong increases, and I don't see too much acknowledgement of that.
@jaki01 | May 25, 2019, 11:18 a.m. | Votes: 12 | [
VOTE ]
> ou are balling people up and falling into generalization traps while you suggest that they are not wise enough to recognize the obvious implications of not policing the network.
Apart from the fact that I don't like the term "policing", I never wrote that I am against the downvote option in general. My main comment under this article makes my position clear.
In the article "My STEEM Vision." I give some reasoning why I think maximization of profits like we see it here is shortsighted and doesn't lead to long-term success. The development of the STEEM price seems to confirm my point of view.
> It's not about purely maximizing profits or they would simply divide the stake into alts and self vote relentlessly.
Just look thoroughly at accounts like - for example - the one of sweetsssj or haejin, and then answer the question if some big users aren't exactly doing that.
> You don't know what the price of steem should be, it could have been vastly overpriced and we are correcting ...
Just check how the rank of STEEM in CoinMarketCap got worse and worse. I see no reason at all why the STEEM value should have "corrected" so much more than the one of its 'crypto colleagues', apart from the one, that the STEEM community wasn't working well due to the greediness of some members and due to a system that made this greediness even more beneficial, because it's gamable too easily. (That's why I am for example in favour of a convergent rewards curve.)
@jaki01 | May 25, 2019, 6:25 p.m. | Votes: 12 | [
VOTE ]
> You weren't here to see the Whale Experiment ...
It seems I am already longer here than you think ...
> You seem to think that there is a thing such as : whale behavior
I am not claiming whales were anyhow worse people than average, but having the power makes them more dangerous (if other people were on top, probably they wouldn't act less shortsighted in average). Thus I plead to institute a system that prevents flag abuse.
> If I were to ask exactly which whales and what percentage of whales do they account for I'm sure that you will be digging for figures and data that you have yet to consider.
I could start listing names with an @ in front of them. Yes, I could do that, but then at the same time should be prepared for the end of my STEEM authorship. :)
Yes, maybe I will reach the point that I don't care their flaggs anymore ... and then you will get your list.
Actually, under this article one can observe it again: people (whales!) are flagging comments of other users just because they disagree with their opinion!
NOT because of any abuse or over rewarded posts.
That is our problem here.
@jaki01 | May 25, 2019, 8:37 p.m. | Votes: 11 | [
VOTE ]
> Prove it ...
Prove that you understood my comments, don't think, don't assume, don't believe, don't "see", don't "read", don't write. Prove it.
Then I prove, that I understood what I have read.
The problem is that you simply don't believe me that I can grasp the sense of comments I have read - a very normal thing in human communication. OK, I also don't believe that you can grasp what I wanted to say. You have to 'prove' it first.
Flag abuse is so obvious for example if a whale follows an account to flag every of its posts and comments automatically without even reading them.
What about proving that 2 + 2 (really) = 4?
From my side there is nothing more to discuss.
> Yes people do that already.
No, they don't. They fear retaliation.
> So in my eyes they were thinking to maximize their profits but did exactly the opposite …
Price of BTC has a bigger impact on Steem price than anything at this point in time.
So, the logical path in the current setup is to hoard as much as you can. Even if Steem only hits $7 when BTC reaches another ATH, that's 20x returns.
If I were a whale who is not confident about Steem's future, that is exactly what I would do: piling tokens. Shitcoin can still moon every now and then.
Hell, if I just sell 1000 Steem when the price reaches $1-2, I would profit.
The free 25% flags will hopefully drop some hammer on the bs on trending and massive self-voters. I'm pretty sure the whales will war with themselves first.
According to the stats I'm informed of: most people don't downvote.
https://steempeak.com/@lalala
You literally only have a handful of people downvoting more than the few times shown on the chart and most of those names are from anti-abuse initiatives of some sort. Or, they are people being flagged by the said groups putting out their retaliation flags.
Most whales seldom downvotes, they are more interested in stacking coins.
> Right, but nevertheless other altcoins, whose prices also denpend on the price of BTC, overtook STEEM, which is only ranked 60th at CoinMarketCap nowadays.
Doesn't matter. Profit is profit. If you think most people are here for the ideals, you are sadly mistaken. The reason why downvoting is so painful on this platform is because everyone views that Steem token as potentially the ticket to massive gains.
Then again, there's also psychology. People complain about being downvoted by tiny votes from @camillesteemer and their hundreds of alts that literally amount to nothing.
That, and also the unrealistic mindset that this is the place to supplement their income. It can be, but it's impossible to be that way for everyone. People like @baah are on the rare side of the spectrum where "Que Será, Será" is the mantra when it comes to rewards. Ideally, only serious content creators and large stakeholders should care about the rewards.
> Look at the comments under this article for example: a whale upvoted his own comment to the top and flagged another comment which actually got way more upvotes.
Because @transisto has been one of the most vocal large stakeholders about this issue. The "more votes" you see simply come from people looking to counter his downvote.
It's hard to make a judgement call on the proposal when I do see the positive and negative side of things, but I do know that status quo is not good.
> A rich pool of satisfied users
And what do you think drive people away more? Seeing crap earning lots on trending or the occasional dang I pissed off a whale scenario? Or maybe it's because this platform has less functions than any other mainstream options?
Sure, I can only offer my opinion based on the people I have talked to. I know some content creators become discouraged because they feel they are better than those who earn much more for less. For me, it's frustrating seeing people would spam and use either large stake or bid bots to create more inflation.
50/50 may be able to curb the shitposting from big accounts somewhat, but I kind of doubt it.
We are going off topic.
If whales actually start flagging stuff on trending, etc. I think it could embolden other users to drop their votes of disapproval as well. No matter the account size, what is the downvoted person going to do? Flag everyone back? Or perhaps, they would just bully the smaller downvoters a bit, but that does not make the big flags go away.
I didn't say there was no justification for this. I pointed out that it was in fact happening, and that @thedegensloth was incorrect to say we can't be kicked off the platform without a hard fork. That list is functionally kicked off the platform, and the only thing between folks on that list and the rest of us is the good will of Steemit.
Regardless of the reasons for Steemit putting folks on that list, there are always more reasons to put people on lists. Lists always expand. What's keeping you off that list? How do you know all the accounts on that list are actually there because of spam? What if @ned went round the bend, or on a bender, and took issue with someone's comments about his hair and stuck them on the list without even mentioning it to anyone? Who would even know?
Why not let individual bloggers apply that list on their blogs, or at least have the option to unlist folks on their posts?
Centralized censorship has become a reality on Steem front ends, and something is going to happen to make that worse if that power isn't decentralized. I realize this was a stopgap measure and undertaken for good cause. The road to hell is a shortcut paved with good intentions.
MIRA can fix this. It is my hope that Moore's Law continues to hold, and also that MIRA can even be improved, such that virtually every account and user can host their own node. If that becomes much more true than it is now, Steem can be truly decentralized, and individual accounts will have to be the loci of censorship, at least this mechanism of censorship.
Until then we just have to trust the listmakers.
>"Other frontends can choose whether or not they want to use it."
Not to my understanding. This list is implemented via the nodes, and other front ends are using the nodes Steemit provides, according to the very limited grasp I have of this mechanism, and that is why Steempeak and Busy are also being impacted. That's why MIRA could solve the problem.
>"...people can still readily access what they did..."
No they can't. People can't extract data from the blockchain anymore than they can build automobiles from scratch. People are functionally limited to publicly available front ends, just as much as they are commercially available cars.
Either trust is a vector for fraud or trustless mechanisms are extant. This list is not a trustless mechanism. You refer to the extant list as if that's the only possible implementation of this mechanism. I tried to point out some humorous examples of why that isn't reasonable, but you seem to have failed to grasp that fact. What if ISIS sent a few thugs to the home office and politely requested some additions or removals from the list? What if CNBC, Russia, or Israel buys Steemit.com? What if hackers attack that centralized single point of weakness?
The status quo won't persist indefinitely, and even if you trust the listmakers today, who makes that list is going to change, as is the list itself. You may not grasp that your trust of those making that list is a vector for fraud, but no victim of fraud ever did until after the fact. I don't distrust @ned to implement this mechanism without fraudulent intent. I just know that @ned isn't any more permanent than I, criminals will seek weaknesses to exploit, and only decentralization prevents centralized power from being projected.
> With an 800mv influence cap, rewards and curation worked just fine.
That might be a good idea to bring back, or anything else that will cause diminishing returns in power the more popular you get. For example logarithms (e.g. 1 popularity measures = 1 measure of power, 10 popularity = 2 power, 100 popularity = 3 power, 1000 -> 4 or 1->1, 2->2, 4->3, 8->4, 16->5 etc.) or roots (e.g. 1->1, 4->2, 9->3, 16-> 4, 25-> 5 etc.).
This way you could both "climb the social ladder of importance", but you couldn't as easily become a "social tyrant" of sorts, who cannot be "overthrown".
>"For every user, there is more to take their place..."
No, there's not. Even if there were an unlimited populace of potential users to draw from, this ignores that getting a user has costs. With a dismal retention rate of about ~7.5% YOY, that's a scary argument to make.
>"...more than a few high ranking people in the community so some people don't even care. They think the reward split for eip with offset this downvote pool with new users."
>"There bet in on the 50/50 reward split will bring more users than we will lose with the changes."
I bet you're talking about bidbot owners. Have you ever noticed a difference between rhetoric and action? Sometimes people say things they don't mean. It's actually a very common practice. Fraud is horribly common, and that's what fraud is.
I'm not saying no one honestly feels this way, but there are certainly people with financial incentive to support proposals such as this which will make their profiteering more profitable. Increasing curation rewards will not in any conceivable way increase retention of new users with insubstantial stakes, because the quantity of rewards they can gain from the work necessary is insubstantial. Most new users won't jump in with substantial stakes, because even fairly simple people will want to test the waters first.
Extant substantial stakeholders are profiteering from their stakes almost to a man. I know of some few that curate for other reasons, and god bless every one of them. They are the exceptions, not the rule.
@smooth | May 25, 2019, 6:20 p.m. | Votes: 4 | [
VOTE ]
If, hypothetically, every single user used all of their downvotes there would be tens or hundreds of thousands of downvotes per day. The drama will fade away into the ether because let's face it, you can't get upset about something that happens literally tens of thousands of times per day to every single post. If nothing else, fatigue over the drama kings and queens trying to turn everything into a personal attack will set in and people will start ignoring it.
Posts will then get ranked and paid out on the basis of which have a more favorable balance of upvotes and downvotes. Some people will upvote stupidly and some will downvote stupidly but mostly that will cancel out and the sensible application of upvotes and downvotes will prevail (unless the majority of the user base and stake are simply stupid, in which case there is no solution). I could not think of a better outcome.
Downvotes are current a big deal and drama today because they are so rare. Whenever it happens it is seen as a personal attack rather than an expression of opinion.
In reality I do not expect everyone to use all of their downvotes, so the favorable outcome described above won't happen, unfortunately. Hopefully we can end up somewhere in the middle.
I can see why you wouldn't want to continue the discussion in this vein. It's pretty obvious that EIP just hands more Steem rewards to profiteers when such trivial justifications for it and better alternatives are carefully considered.
You have an agile mind, and I'm confident that were you interested you could devise better means of encouraging rational investment that drove capital gains. I'm not going to speculate as to your motivations, but I can see that your stated reasons to support EIP also support profiteering. Whether you discuss these matters or not, they'll be discussed, and the consequences of EIP will happen and become unavoidably obvious should it be adopted.
I have seen several comments in this conversation already referring to folks powering down now. Accelerating rapine of rewards via EIP will spread that exodus exponentially, whether or not it's discussed. The recent inception of centralized censorship of Steem accounts will make that worse. I find the faint opposition to both of these degradations of Steem strong evidence that the end is in sight, and better capitalized men than I are implementing their exit strategies.
May you enjoy every success in your ventures. Sometimes getting what we always wanted reveals we should want better, and I look forward to seeing what comes next from folks that have learned from the Steem story.
> What the fuck kind of latrine trash reasoning do you and other such prophets adhere to?
If it was not meant for minnows and the population in general then they would not have had polls to change the flag to a down arrow, they would not have pinned the Initial couple of EIP post, and they certainly would not have pinned this one for all on steem to see.
History and experimentation show that given unchecked power people will use that power. Take a re-look at the Stanford Prison Experiment, take a look at any social behavior experiment that give the ordinary extraordinary powers. Un like YT, FB, and a few other sites there is no real troll type activity other than the few serial down voters/flaggers on steemit. One does not need to be a prophet to look on seem and see or hear about the of accounts that were bullied off the platform from flaggers. (Some deserved it, others not.)
This downvote pool has never been about anything other than money. I have never said it is about anything other than the big stakeholders wanting to make more money.
It takes large stakeholders to fix it, I thought I clearly pointed that out with showing how many minnows and dolphins it would take to come together and have an effect on a large payout.
Perhaps there is a language barrier for you or a comprehension issue.
> a lost in the sauce nonsense Individual
The "large stakeholders do care about the health of the network", they do not care about the health of the network, they care about the health of their investment.
However all that said, thank you for such an enlightening response, I have never been schooled by someone that wants to be screwed in the ass by a bulldozer.
First of all, thank you for all the countless hours, hard work, blood and sweat you have put into this blockchain. You are truly a technological genius. In fact, this place seems to be filled with quite a few technological geniuses. There are also many brilliant scientific and logical minds.
Unfortunately, what seems to be missing around here are geniuses in the field of human behavior. This idea is a prime example of the lack of expertise in how humans typically behave. This idea seems to hinge on the premise that the people who interact with the blockchain and the content on it will act in a logical way that will benefit the platform as a whole. During the three years I have been here, I have seen no evidence that the majority of people will act this way. There is much evidence to the contrary. People have acted in their own personal short term interest. That is why we have the problems with content that we do.
This idea also implements a system that rewards negativity. I am no expert on human behavior either, but this does not seem like a way to attract masses of people.
Actually I am going to stop. I am not an expert in human behavior. Before doing something so drastic, I hope the team consults with someone who truly understands if this idea will be more likely to attract people to or repel them from the platform.
I understand the value of "you will never know unless you try", but with so much on the line, I would hope the team would do a tremendous amount of research and consult with experts in this area before firing blindly.
I would imagine you would laugh if an expert on human behavior came in and started messing with your code. The converse should also be true. This blockchain is a technological masterpiece, but it has zero value if people do not use it. You have built it, now you need an expert to show you how to get the masses to want to use it.
There are some obvious big whale villains that need stopping, but also flag/downvote wars is just not the way to build an open and welcoming community.
I haven't run/seen any simulations/scenerio's to know the effect of the down vote system proposed here...I think some people are reasonably hinting this would be useful, i.e. seeing some practical use case examples might help my tired brain see the benefits (vs. just jumping it straight into production).
I think the key priority should be on ensuring those whom provide good content, past, present and future get a just and fair reward.
I would like the engineers to look at things in the works with these 3 lens as well. Thanks for asking @vandeberg what could be looked at next. My feedback is whatever you look at, can you think about the result with the above 3 lens, and then present pros, cons, etc to back up its been thoroughly thought through (although I'm sure its clear in a few people minds, with out some stick figure diagrams, my brain is too tired to work out :))
This focus of giving a carrot is far more like to improve the view of the platform then chasing and hitting bad people making pennies with a stick.
I know everyone wants to be treated fairly and the focus should be on more content, fun experiences and positive actions and rewards (not removal of rewards and the controversy it brings).
I think of the analogy of a bunch of managers spending their time checking how many days sick and employee has off and month...and finding a way to put a stop to it...wasting hours hitting them with a stick and making them feel guilty - when instead if they focused on the peoples strengths and getting performance up.
All the best
@baah | May 26, 2019, 2:09 p.m. | Votes: 1 | [
VOTE ]
Exactly, everyone from India is a scammer. Nuff said, let's ban all these Indians. The point is not how racist/prejudice you think I am, but that it's a very naive thing to think that this hasn't been thought up thousands of times, discussed to death, and thoroughly investigated already, plus, exactly why would anybody want to invest money if it's not about SP anymore?
And finish your God damn thoughts, who lied to you and told you that this place was supposed to be better than?
Look, https://www.facebook.com/bah.fucyou
Verified Facebook User. Do you realize how easy it is to spoof cellphones, fake id's, and nowadays create Voice from absolutely nothing and Video from one picture? You know what you can't do that with? Crypto. Even money is fairly easy to counterfeit : get all the old $5 bills you can get that have Lincoln on the ghost image. Spray it with Oven Cleaner, put it in the microwave for a few seconds, wash the ink off, print an old $100 on a piece of paper and don't change any settings, that that blank bill and carefully tape it by the corners over the printed version, put the paper in the printer and print it again, flip it around. Hope that people will not thoroughly check that it's Benjamin not that impostor attorney who lawfully couldn't hold office Lincoln (irony /titles of nobility) and denied the states the right to secede (
see more proof I'm racist, even if I have a black wife).
You know who had the time? Every single fucking poor ass Indian who can program better than most Americans can do simple math or COOK. Stop and thoroughly consider what you suggest.
@baah | May 25, 2019, 5:27 a.m. | Votes: 0 | [
VOTE ]
>Instead of giving free downvotes, why not figure out a way to punish the behaviour that should be downvoted?
That's exactly what a downvote is. You're literally asking, instead of arresting people for crimes why not punish them for their behavior?
Then you go to say that you are downvoting, but implying that downvoting isn't the system which is literally designed not to prevent but to dissuade the behavior because to prevent it would burden everyone at the expense of preventing a few.
What you want is to prevent people from upvoting.. That's exactly what downvoting is, yet obviously you can't and shouldn't be able to "prevent" as that inherently taxes/burdens everyone and hinders freedom, you should though be able to dissuade, as that gives people a chance to correct and change and it effects a few not the whole.
How would you adjust curation?
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@baah | May 25, 2019, 2:47 p.m. | Votes: 0 | [
VOTE ]
There's literally no real difference between punishment and prevention. You realize that prevention is punishment for everyone. You limit everyone in hopes of curbing what direct punishment is intended to curb.
As for the freedom, there is no such freedom. You don't have the freedom because there is nothing that can decide what is spam or what isn't. Some could have a very low tolerance for spam and others might not even know or recognize spam or agree that it's spam regardless of what it is. You can't just invent freedoms and act as if they have any place in the world as freedom when all they are is but arbitrary limits. I want the freedom of not seeing white cars, I want the freedom of not hearing honking for no reason, I want the freedom of "not"..
You can't have freedom to blacklist curators because you can thus blacklist everyone but a couple of alts and self vote in impunity. The author isn't the one dishing out rewards, curators are. Freedom isn't limiting people on arbitrary nonsense. The reason why flagging exist is to dissuade abuse, not to limit it. Much like laws in the real world aren't intended to prevent anyone or anything but to dissuade it. There are numerous ways to circumvent any suggestions you may have, and if not, if your suggestions are so overreaching then you cannot call arbitrary limits and obstacles Freedom or act as if it's increasing Freedom. What the heck did I just wake up in 1984, Ministry of Freedom?
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There is a difference between punishment and prevention. Not all preventative measurements are punishments and not all punishments are preventative. There are random downvotes which are more of an attack than a punishment as they aren't punishing anything. There are preventative measures such as RC limits which are not punishments. I don't want to talk philosophy here.
Providing free downvotes will lead to abuse, they need to have a cost for a reason. Downvotes are not the only form of punishment. If Steem is to become more popular we need to limit this libertarian concept of absolute freedom, libertarians are a small minority which scare away a majority. I should be able to filter who can comment and upvote me.
If someone wants to go through the effort of preventing everyone from upvoting them so be it, thousands of accounts can be created each day. If I don't want micro upvotes worth less than a thousandth of a Steem then what's the problem?
Preventing some bot from commenting or voting on a blog is not akin to Orwell's s ministry of truth. I fail to see the connection you are trying to make here. Are you trying to prove my point? SPAM is what comes out of the ministry of truth. Ignorance is strength. Repeated unwanted messages are propaganda.
It's very easy to determine what spam is. It is irrelevant or in appropriate messages or comments. It is also a repeated message sent indiscriminately to a large amount of people. A spam filter is a great idea, we can all set our own tolerances that is my point.
Maybe you didn't read my blog on spam mentions and comments, sometimes I get 20 or 30 a day and it would be very beneficial to block this nonsense.
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@baah | May 25, 2019, 3:56 p.m. | Votes: 0 | [
VOTE ]
You should literally leave this place because the vast, overwhelming majority is Libertarians and Anarchists and they have no concept of absolute freedom but they value Freedom much, much more than you surely do. To you, freedom and imposing arbitrary limits is synonymous. Sorry but freedom is highly valued here, it's at the very core of why steem exists, the reason why you are on here right now is because of the ethos of Freedom of Expression manifested as Steem and without that you without a doubt wouldn't be here, none of us would. There will never ever be anyone with any sizable stake in the system (even @berniesanders) who will get behind the idea of arbitrary limits and blacklists over who can vote and who cannot or what is spam and what isn't.
Also you claimed that its very easy to determine what spam is, and you say "it's irrelevant or unwanted messages". Well, no shit, but to who? To the receiving end? And here comes the rub, how do you make that determination Automatically? O yeah, you set it yourself. Ergo you try to censor on a platform that is built on the cornerstone of freedom of speech and it holds that as it's most guarded aspect. You will never, ever have any chance at your "freedom" to be considered on here, even if you power up 99.999999999999999% of all the steem available and buy up all the remaining stake, you will literally be the only one here, everyone else would have moved on to the next iteration of Freedom Of Speech /Steem. Yes people will abuse things, yet there is a difference between a few rotten apples and a vast majority. People said that changing flagging to downvote is a bad idea because it will make downvoting more acceptable. They were VERY wrong. Exactly how they will be that suggests that giving people free downvotes will turn everyone into trolls that abuse it. Nonsense.
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@jaki01 | May 25, 2019, 4:05 a.m. | Votes: 39 | [
VOTE ]
Maybe you remember that I would support the implementation of a "convergent linear rewards curve". Concerning 'downvotes' I had the following thoughts (copied from my own post "My STEEM Vision."):
> I think it's good and right that the possibility to flag (now called downvoting) exists in a decentralized social network. How else can spam or even worse, such as child pornography, be fought? I also think it makes sense in principle to be able to reduce the reward for posts that are extremely overrated from one's own point of view.
The crux, however, is that downvotes are often set for the sole reason of pursuing other users, solely because of their dissenting opinions or even completely independent of what they write(!), and denying them permanent visibility and any rewards. This is counterproductive to say the least and makes a devastating impression on newcomers who happen to observe such 'flag wars' or even get into them! We should be aware of this.
If it were up to me, ways and means would have to be found to contain 'flag wars' waged purely for personal motives. For example, a committee of respected users elected by the community and equipped with sufficient delegated STEEM power could be called in such cases and then decide whether the flags were justified or not.
In my opinion the suggestion to provide each user with a certain number of free downvotes 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.
Nevertheless, your idea of the "hybrid approach" is interesting and at least makes it somewhat less profitable to flag a lot, "just for fun".
People... You are constantly thinking about one single thing, it's redistribution. Redistribution is not how the economy works. The economy is about additional value.
The only question that you should solve is how to make Steem more valuable in USD.
According to everything we know, it means that you need to either:
* get more users on Steemit platform
* spread Steem token to platforms that are able to attract users
It's the only thing you should care about.
Imagine If you were VW. Golf sales are not good.
Your solution analogue to this would be: "maybe we should put a real button here"
[IMAGE: https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmWAK13X5Sd1SR4rcvZ4hKGR3MtWiEZyuoZubqWaQSfmD5/image.png]
Wrong answer. VW stocks will grow up if they sell more cars, because VW is not Golf. So they have 30 models in their portfolio.
If someone doesn't want a Golf, they are not going to buy it no matter what. Maybe they want an SUV, maybe a sedan, maybe... Ferrari.
You need to change the product
Or to make a new product
Can you imagine pitching this idea to an outside investor? Or to famous blogger? "We are hosting the platform that you didn't care about for 3 years, but now, there is a new feature - downvotes!"
Please, test on 1000 subjects, and tell me how many of them joined
No. of wallets = correlated with the number of users = correlated with the noise those people create = correlated with the price
Why USD is stable and accepted as universal? Because 5.000.000.000 people know about it and use it.
Would you accept to make a business with Zimbabwe dollars instead?
Why, because nobody has any clue about that currency = it's not stable
> problem that steem is solving is all predicated on what crypto is and isn't, and crypto is about removing the financial reins from the bankers
Wait... There is no problem. Banks are working fine. I get my salary on time, I can pay from/to the opposite side of the world, I can plan 30 years ahead. There is no fundamental problem, there are some aspects that could/should/will be improved.
The world is functioning without crypto, keep that in mind.
Can Ripple improve it a bit - yes.
Can we implement crypto in administration - yes
Gain more freedom in trading - yes
Should we replace FIAT with Crypto?
Unless we want a war that would last for 100 years across the globe - no
@baah | May 26, 2019, 2:35 p.m. | Votes: 1 | [
VOTE ]
Not at all true. No. of wallets do no correlate to shit. I can open numerous wallets without any Bitcoins in them. Price is largely speculation at this point. Trading volume is meaningless, I literally had 51 bitcoin volume in a week from trading with a bot less than .2 of a bitcoin.
Why USD is stable and accepted everywhere? Because of countless invasions and wars, especially economic wars, because the bankers are rumored to offset inflation by hand, moving zeros around, because if they fail to keep the ruse going they know that it will be the last one they have, because literally their life, their children, everything they ammased depends on them not letting inflation run away, and because you cannot audit them.
Yes we should replace fiat with crypto, no it won't be a war, we should simply to be free from the power that damns entire nations for not joining the house of cards that IMF/World Bankruptcy is.
@pibara | May 25, 2019, 7:31 a.m. | Votes: 3 | [
VOTE ]
Maybe try and fix the real problem with downvotes first:
Downvotes, as only corrective measure create a situation where there is real insentive to choose more disruptive use of stake to maximize profit (running a bid not, messing up the trending pages and messing up the reputation system) over less disruptive behaviour for maximizing proffits (commenting on your own posts and upcoming those comments).
Currently bid not owners are abusing the reward pool while being more or less bullet proof as long as they don't post or comment. The worst of the bid bot users, through using bid bots all of the time boost their reputation enough to gain the higher ground against most potential down voters, as we have all learned retaliation is a bitch and down voting someone with a higher (in this case, false-) reputation than you isn't wise.
Have a look at the results from this poll. While opinions differ on what behaviour by passive stake holders is preferable, everyone seems to agree running a bidbot is not.
I mentioned two possible measures in my counter proposal post that could help actually address creating the preferable incentives instead.
- Make reputation impact of upvotes opt-in and document it as being meant only to be used by actual personal user wallets, not by bid bots. That would address much of the false reputation created by bid bots today.
- Implement a blockchain wide advertising economy. For users, bid bots are free limited scope advertising. Provide them with better alternatives, and not only would that disincentive bidbots, it will also create a tool for drawing in new top content providers, away from other blogging and blogging platforms.
As with the linear convergent rewards that is a bad idea once you do the math, because it does nothing to incentify huge fish to behave, whilst hitting new users disproportionally hard, this part of the proposal too is more likely to worsen the platform economics than to better it.
I know these posts are done mostly for show and you guys already have made up your minds about implementing these "features" as long as the top witnesses are on board (and it seems most of those guys are easily confused by a bit of high school level math), but in the end, these three measures seem to all be tailored specifically, not to improve the economic position of the platform within the world ecconomy but to improve the ecconomic position of Steemit Inc within the STEEM economy. I hope I am wrong about this, and that you will look at the arguments against these specific measures and alternatives suggested my me and others.
Good reasoning and good question.
I can answer simply, all top 20 post are promoted. The important question is what's their cost in % and net $ after reward returns.
The answer is; it takes currently a budget of 115$ worth of STEEM to promote a fresh post near the top with cost of about -5%. yes, negative cost, that's a 5% profit. Meaning anything less than a 5$ downvote has no negative effect whatsoever in people promoting bad content to the top.
There are two solution to this.
1. More downvotes where it matters first, (the top trendings)
2. Remove all profits to vote buyers by making vote buying more easily accessible to everyone and letting people willing to pay a high premium do so.
A lot of more external money would be interested in buying votes at high premium if the top #trendings were bigger center of attention.
At @Steemium we've been collecting historical data of every bidbot bidding rounds and snapshots of top 50 trending for the last 7 months. Here are some charts that might interest you https://steemium.com/#/statistics/trending
The Steem EIP
Yes, that's the one (facepalm)
As repeated numerous times, call it "Steemit EIP" if anything. Using a naming that's not leaving room for any other proposal name is a scummy move. We already know you have full control over this blockchain's governance, no need to rub it in.
> While it does not incentivize curating through downvotes,
Yes it does, curation via downvote is more likely to increase the value of the token and therefore using an amount free downvotes bring a net positive monetary value to the user.
> If everyone did this, then no content would have any reward shares and would then not get any reward.
What kind of FUD is this? You know full well this would never happen. We have a hard time having any downvote how can you think the sum of all users actions across all content would be more downvotes than upvotes. There is no word for how ridiculous that is.
I think your hybrid solution is similar to this one can you confirm? https://steemit.com/steem/@transisto/separate-downvoting-power-pool-concept-visualized
Allocating rewards to the right initiatives is more important than content discovery.
Why have an arbitrarily over-sized upvoting pool compared to downvoting? Why so much complexity?
Reddit statistics shows there are 10 times more upvotes than downvotes (without monetary incentive). People will invariably downvote less even with 100% DV pool because here votes have economic value which has more direct real life consequences. If we want to have a balanced ecosystem some community member/stakeholders will have to take the responsibility to downvotes for all of those who don't. They will be called tyrants and be at risk to become target for off-chain/real life attacks not just benign downvote retaliations.
Steem will also need way more downvotes to counter collusion of for profit voting guilds if a switch is made to 50% curation reward.
As part of a "deep dive" I would review the change in number of downvotes that were caused by Steemit recent changes from flag to down arrow.
You forgot to mention that many witness suggested that the reward pool be independently delegatable. I didn't think this was all that important with 100% downvote but it for sure is if only 25%.
Ps: I upvoted your post because I think it's an important discussion to have but I find your analysis to be very shallow and possibly disingenuous.
Upvote Based From Bought & Earned SP
@artopium, you made a good point. It seems that upvoting is probably based at least partly or possibly completely by SP. Like you said already, SP can be bought and it can be earned. So, sadly, some people may not get that. I should probably write articles and make videos about those things.
Gifting
Because you are right that upvoting is gifting. You are giving somebody something via an upvote. You do own that in a sense or you should. Yes, some people will probably say you don't.
Interfering
But we have problems with that when it comes to money that people can wire into their Steemit Wallet. Also, you earn money when people upvote your posts.
Bitcoin v Steem
Technically, one might argue by saying that Steem is like Bitcoin, that it stays on the blockchain as a cryptocurrency. But regardless, when you get Bitcoin, how would you like it if people interfered with a Bitcoin transfer from one point to another. When we try to compare Bitcoin to Steem, and never mind their differences, we can see that Steem could function similar to Bitcoin regardless of the differences on the principles of cryptography to how it all works in theory or even in practicality meaning that flagging should not be a feature at all. Instead, there should be likes and dislikes and a view count for posts that are separate from the upvotes.
Punished
You should not be punished for disliking. You should not be allowed to punish other people by disliking or downvoting or flagging. I would rather have a social network that allows for upvoting and no downvoting. I'm ok with dislikes but not flagging or downvotes. Another problem might be in the shared Steem pool system and there should be one pool per person as opposed to only one pool for everybody.
Disclaimer
Some of what I'm saying here may not be the best idea and may not work. That's my disclaimer. But this is how I feel. This is what I prefer and it is what I would seek after.
@ackza | June 4, 2019, 3:57 a.m. | Votes: 1 | [
VOTE ]
Transisto should have the job of @elipowell lol
No seriously tho transisto is so right here.... it's so much more important to fund steem Infrastructure projects than worrying about flags and downvotes and content discovery... people just want a place to hangout with content as good as reddit but where they get paid a lil bit of money since reddit pays them nothing.....
Yeah if we funded good projects we would bring so many new people and attract so many influencers that the good content would flood any bad content
Holy shit that's it I just realized how true transistos point is.... my God it's so simple.....
Steemit inc is worrying about policing what little posts remain instead of trying to attract new people new content and have good and decent posts outnumber the bad...
The goal of steemit is to be as close to reddit as possible but without censorship and rewarding users
Why cant steemit inc realize that we have to get subreddits or substeemits first before anything so people can actually curate worth while content pages, like in reddit...where people visit everyday just to read the posts
Can you imagine a reddit where people got paid for their reddit karma?
If steemit doesnt hurry up, reddit will resurrect reddit notes, scale with eos using blochain and airdrop reddit note tokens to all their karma holders
Posted using Partiko Android
The title of this post is "Downvote Pool Deep Dive" yet there is one essential piece missing form this "deep dive". What is the goal of creating any amount of "free" downvotes? I am assuming it is to encourage higher quality content and thus attract and retain more content creators and consumers.
If that is indeed the goal, how do free downvotes help meet that goal?
If upvotes have not been used to meet this goal, what makes anyone think downvotes will?
Have we done a "deep dive" to see what is causing the lack of quality content? Have we even defined "quality content"?
Personally I think that two of the main reasons that the content sucks on here is that there is a huge financial incentive to blindly sell one's vote or blindly vote trade. Another is that those who do forgo the short term financial gains of vote selling/trading and who actually do want to encourage great content, do not have enough time in the day to find it and the site does very little to make it easier to find it. For years all content has been lumped together in one giant stew. Is that how successful sites like reddit work?
Now on top of not having enough time to find quality content, someone who is a "good actor" needs to also spend time finding content to downvote?
I would imagine in programming you look at things from a "problem - solution" standpoint. Define the problem then create a solution. This seems like you are creating a not thoroughly thought out solution for an undefined problem.
Can we:
- Define the problem
- Pinpoint the causes of the problem
- Come up with a plan of attack to address each cause of the problem based on research and experts who have fixed similar problems
- Implement the well thought out solution
@baah | May 30, 2019, 3:14 p.m. | Votes: 0 | [
VOTE ]
I'm not bothered, the people who have a sense of curiosity will seek out my comments first. I know why I got downvoted, I told @berniesanders to eat a dick twice, once on his own post and once on the steemit blog post about the Keychain being merged into condenser. The point is, ironically, that no one can censor you. There are numerous people who self censor so they don't tag @berniesanders, others who won't even dare to mention him, @berniesanders, but the fact remains that he isn't forcing them, and that censorship isn't someone booing or jeering at you, or someone rating you poorly, or making you comment hidden. I know, I have been censored by numerous people for speaking the truth in the face of their lies on Facebook, I was censored on there by Facebook as well before it was the cool status of rebels the world over. I have no delusion about what censorship is and despite being flagged by @berniesanders with his bots numerous of times, I will still defend his right to jeer and boo, even if I don't agree with it.
I think you should really consider what downvoting is. It's a form of punishment, and punishment is a very, if not the most potent form of negative behavior modification that exists. Yes encouragement and rewards benefit positive behavior, but no ammount of it will curb negative behavior. Downvoting is also the best, most effective way to make people who are primarily here for rewards, to rethink their approach to steem, especially if they are leeching, since such behavior will undermine everyone's rewards given enough time and enough leeching. So downvote, and even threaten to do so, the point of it should only be lost on people like me, who see rewards as a bonus but not a necessity since speaking the truth is my reward.
Posted using Partiko Android
Ah, the good old argument of 'people don't need to know'...
Firstly, this is a very irrefutable argument, as proven by this video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESAt2f2nCWM
If a monkey can use a mobile app, why would we need to put texts or explain things that will hinder the monkeys entertainment, right?
Thing is, people WANT TO KNOW. Did you ever recruit anyone to steem without him asking tons of questions on where the money comes from, why can't they just vote and give infinite money, etc etc. They need to understand the rules make sense in order for them to join in, especially if they are forced to have financial stake in the system.
Every long-term user of steem (we want more of them) knows about these rules, they had to learn them the hard way. Many didn't and are now using facebook or reddit again.
Right, you cannot force cooperation else it wouldn't be cooperation anymore. Let's say 'promote cooperation' then.
"Abuse" is a bit too strong of a word this case, but people have spoken that they did not find your content worthy of rewards.
Yes, value of dissenting opinions is also important and should be partially preserved, but in my opinion (speaking for my own downvote) stating that "Weighted Downvotes = Theft" is too ridiculous to be rewarded on par with other content. Other people are free to decide otherwise.
And regarding weighted power... I agree this is not ideal, but I can't think of any other solutions. Either the "best" guys have the most power, everyone is equal or something and between. In the former case there is at least some correlation between a person's (or, sadly, bot's) "quality", leaving abuse opportunities for "the rich", in the latter there are abuse opportunities if you manage to get a hold of a large number of accounts.
In my opinion the weighted option is better.
@klevn | May 26, 2019, 6:06 p.m. | Votes: 0 | [
VOTE ]
most don't want to engage in flag wars, which is toxic in its inception.
remove the ability of abuse, but don't expect common users to benefit from this system of downvoting.
i want to know how this will help from retaliation downvotes.
i disagreed with berniesanders and lost money on multiple posts unrelated to the conversation. here are the two posts, and if you look at my blog you'd notice they even downvoted some guy i resteemed.
https://steemit.com/flatearth/@klevn/ball-earthers-change-perspective-to-make-theory-work
https://steemit.com/steemit/@klevn/i-make-up-my-mind-all-the-time-sometimes-i-change-it
https://steemit.com/flatearth/@flatearth/apollo-wires-and-other-blatant-nasa-fakery
i don't see how this will help that. I literally got 100+ downvotes on an unrelated posts from berniebots.
so in my opinion, we need a jury voted in, a jury of invested steemians with a decent sized following, that a sizable majority agree is fair, made up of normal steemians.
if enough people vote to complain about someone, it is brought to the jury.
this downvoting thing as a way to counteract bad actors only works on a small scale, it fails in the face of bad whales.
