@TeamSteem... Excellent Questions & Very Valid points of concern...

Will be Good to hear the answers/discussions/responses because a lot is at stake...

Thank You TeamSteem

Cheers !!

I will be waiting for the intellectual discussion among witnesses here so that i can also learn since I am neither a whale nor a witness!

I came across this post two weeks back,what do you have to say about it??

This dilemma, I think, has divided the platform in apparently unreconcilable bands.
I don't quite understand the numbers, but I wonder if there have been in-between options proposed so that the whales and dolphins (as some of them have expressed) do not see it as a waste of their hard-worked resources to vote for other people's posts (increase of curation percentage, proportional to SP?).
The thing is that some users have blantantly expressed that they don't see it right/fair to benefit others with their votes , as if others are not doing the same with theirs, especially minnows. It's a sad reflection of the inequalities of the "real" world and no matter how oftern it is stated that people have equal opportunity to make the same amount of money/SP, here we can see how much complicated that can be.
Maybe the end result of this dispute will be the corroboration of close humanity is from salvation or damnation (and I'm only losely using the terms in their religious denotation).

What about people with 100s of accounts?

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Hi @teamsteem I'm a bot, and wanted you to know that I've upvoted and re-steemed your post to help you with your promotion efforts! -exp

Excellent point of view

Yes is my short answer to question 1.

Do you think that this is urgent (before SMT urgent), or could be trialed in SMTs when they are ready, or can wait until after SMTs to be implemented 'here'?

With the ideas around a separate down-vote pool / less VP lost down-voting, and a change in the rewards split to 50/50, should these be trialed separately and/or together?

Despite the general feeling that something isn't right, I suspect Steem to soldier on to SMTs without changes. The soldier could well be heavily wounded and smelling of his own crap, depending on the level of 'rent-keeping' before then.

One of the best things about non-linear approach is unpredictability that non only adds more thrill to the experience but also removes the predictability factor from it. I believe this is one of the most detailed post on this topic. Excellent piece of work one more time @teamsteem. You're simply the best!

Yes! it is urgent. If not what should we tell people right now? Upvote yourself exclusively until the fix because if not you'll lose ROI to the most unscrupulous.

To the second question, I don't know. These measures onto themselves without some sort of superlinear don't seem to solve the issue. Less costly or free flagging still returns the rewards to the reward pool as I've already mentioned, leaving the loophole open.

Different curation splits will affect the game only if some sort of superlinear reward is introduced.

I really would like to see some answers from the addressed people here ...

I am not a witness, and you know my point of view already to agree that a linear reward curve favors self-voting too much, indeed, but that I personally would prefer a curve which starts non-linear (against self-voting) and ends linear (against excessive rewards of single posts).

Anyway: good that you keep asking these important questions!

Cheers @sacret-agent!

I'm glad to read this!

Steem is stake based so there's no issue.

It is not unreconcilable. Steem is evolving.

I'm glad you're joining this conversation @dobartim!

Then it will go back to single votes being worthless. Wouldn't whales just spread their stake across different accounts to self vote?

I believe this is one of the most detailed post on this topic. Excellent piece of work one more time @teamsteem. You're simply the best!

Appreciated!

Linear rewards leave selfish upvoters at an advantage. Overall they can engage in the bare minimum amount of work (exclusive self-upvote) maximizing their ROI/influence/wealth, while the rest will inevitably see them diminish. (This "work" can easily be fully automated.)

This statement doesn't seem to be true at all. It's quite evident that giving large stakeholders a larger say under superlinear makes it even more profitable to self upvote. That's primarily why I believe any superlinear proposal needs to not be pure n^x but with a return to linear as the stake increases.

So no, #1 I do not entirely agree with, and funnily enough I haven't really seen a convincing argument for it either. Hell, the curve doesn't appear to matter for maximizers, no matter how you roll. And you need to distinguish between "passive investors" (if you can even call it that), who will choose the laziest way of accumulating tokens regardless of what system you throw at them.

Possibly the only thing I've seen in here that might matter is the statement "less large stakeholders are easy to police" but um.... nope, I don't think this is true. It's not true now, it wasn't true during n^2 (correct if wrong), and it won't be true if we go back.

I really would like to see some answers from the addressed people here ...

Amen!

That wouldn't give them any advantages.

That's encouraging. I really hope so.

This post has received a 86.59 % upvote from @boomerang.

Well then maybe we should go back to it and see how it works. Along with a 5 day payout instead of 7 to be aligned with the new delegation time.

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what is it useful to us

"In order to realign incentives and discourage individuals from simply voting for themselves, money must be distributed in a nonlinear manner."

I agree with the above statement; however, I don't feel that is the correct question to be asking here. The problem we are trying to solve here is not people "voting for themselves", it's how to properly incentivize real curation efforts as compared to automated "gaming" of the reward system.

In my opinion, no change in numbers or algorithm will achieve that goal. No matter what we set the reward curve to, or the curation percentage, it will always be possible to take advantage of the algorithm to gain optimal rewards via automated voting over manual curation.

The only way I see as a realistic possibility to effectively combat that is a crowdsourcing approach (as compared to an algorithmic approach). Currently the crowdsourcing aspect of Steem rewards is clearly broken due to the extreme disincentive to downvote, which is why I am strongly in favor of something like a separate downvote pool which is being discussed.

Once that is in place, I think the rest of the reward system should be made as simple as possible for people to understand, as this will help the crowdsourcing effort. That is why I am against changing both the reward curve and the curation percentage. I feel those changes will end up being gamed just the same as the current system is now, and on top of that they make things more complicated for users to understand which will hurt the effective crowdsourcing of rewards which I hope we can improve significantly.

I should probably make a more detailed post about my thoughts on this topic when I have some time.

And when only those with the most SP are the fewest amount of accounts, they decide who does and doesnt get rewarded, yet they can't curate the whole platform to vote for everyone's content. When whales stopped voting for a few months, the community decided more, rather than a few who had the concentrated power to decide who gets rewarded. N2 might be better with whales not voting, but not when they do and essentially control most.of the reward allocation on the platform. Unless you want a few ppl to handle voting for who does/doesnt get rewarded on the whole platform, its not good as i see it...

Fully agree. I remember SteemIt before non-linear rewards. It was abysmal. Changing rules constantly actually undermines faith in SteemIt.

(I want to re-steem a comment)

Yeah, as I've seen the back and forth on this topic, it seems to me that every proposal needs a downvoting component for it (and I do like that you say 'crowd-sourced' here, that does seem apt) to work, so I am pretty much in agreement with you here.

it's interesting that it's the same problem of power-distribution like in the world out there. maybe steemit didn't emancipate enough? what's about a curve that directs most of the power to most of the people?!

Thank you for your comment. However, you haven't answered the questions.

Superlinear reward encourages some curation as opposed to the current system that incentivizes exclusive self-upvotes. Good or bad can only be determined by the person doing the curation.

@teamsteem (in his article above) and I (in my comment and here) wrote already what we think is useful ... But of course there are many different opinions.
I would like to read the point of views of top witnesses here, too!

awesome

Your approach might work with a reasoned opponent, but this was arbitrary.
Same with downvotes being separated from flags.

Its not no because reasons, its no because i said so.

Petty tyranny is petulant, and unlikely to repond to reason, ergo, the resistance to sound arguments.

Good luck.

It may, but my point is that I would prefer to keep the reward algorithm as simple as possible, and allow the community to regulate it from there. So if the community decides that excessive self-upvoting is bad, they can downvote people who do that, which then removes the incentive that is there now.

I wrote my response here:

https://steem-bounty.com/bounty/steem/knircky/non-linear-reward-is-fundamentally-unfair

I want to write this as a direct response to this post: https://steemit.com/steem/@teamsteem/why-i-advice-against-linear-reward and the very direct question that is asked:

Teamsteem, first off thank you for sharing your thoughts. I think as a big holder of SP you probably have seen many of the effects you describe first hand.

I do not agree with the statement. It may not be wrong but I don't think it is the most relevant question.
I do not think steem can be fixed by removing the linear reward curve.

The problem of the money distribution is that is too concentrated, in my opinion. In order to have network effect we need many users.

Yes!

The hardest thing to do for a cryptocurrency is to distribute its supply among many users in a fair way that generates value. That to me seems the relevant question. This is generic question any blockchain project must solve. And I don't think it has been solved effectively yet.

Clearly we suck at that. As a result we have a situation where all of the wealth is super concentrated. Out of a million users not even 300 reallly matter and if we had 10 million more that won't actually change.

The other relevant question that is specific for steem in my eyes is also how do we generate great content and support and attract content producers. Since we want to be a content platform.

But what you address first and foremost addresses distribution.

So since the problem we have right now is that SP is too concentrated among few users. I mean 0.1% hold all the relevant SP. If we have nonlinear distribution than those %0.1 just get even more power than they already hold.

How does that solve anything!?? Self voting and vote selling is not actually the problem. Just because everything thinks it is does not make it so.

I think that self voting is totally fine according to the design of the steem right now. I am not saying that self voting is a desired feature, but it is a feature by design at this time. If you hold X amount of SP you simply have the right to distribute X amount of reward. That is fair. It is simple proof of stake in that regard. Any time a user does not self vote they simply are kind and reward others by choice. So what you propose simply creates an unfair system for the rich and as a result becomes bad for everyone but the richest users. Yes it will dis-incentice self voting a bit, but won't actually solve it (still better to give yourself something vs lots to others) and create a huge problem on top of it: more concentration and unfairness for the reward distribution.

I believe that if you want to prevent self voting and vote selling than you would have to redesign steem fundamentally, such as by implementing an ID system so this could properly implemented. Today ID is not possible or has not been implemented by any other party than Goverments.

So the most imporant aspect is to have fair distribution and then we would need good distribution. But we cannot have good distribution without it being fair. As a result I believe what you are calling for is counterproductive. What I mean is that solving self voting may be good, but we cannot do it at the cost of unfair distribution. Fair distribution is far more important that not being able to accrue interest for your holdings.

The reason why content is not rewarded right now is because we have not actually built a platform for content, but at least the linear distribution of rewards is fair in a sense.

If we want to reward content we need to build on having a system that focus more on content discovery and rewarding good content. Simply making distribution less fair is not going to turn this platform in a content platform.

So in summary I am on your side and feel the need to make steem better and particularly make it so that more coins get distributed among users that create great content. I do feel we need a different solution than non-linear distribution as it makes the reward system fundamentally unfair.
This "un-fairness" is quite obvious and as such won't be accepted.

What are your thoughts?

Curation rewards aren't linear now. They are only linear relative to stake. They are not linear in time: early voters gain versus later voters. This one point alone destroys this entire argument that rewards must be superlinear relative to stake voted.

The first thing that popped to mind as well to me was that it was not the relevant question. Interesting.

I have a doubt when it comes to downvoting.

I think downvoting must be part of the system, however, I am worried about a culture of downvoting. Downvotes are perceived much much stronger than upvotes, so if everyone downvotes a lot this may backlash.

It works on youtube though.

I think that's mostly because downvoting is so rare nowadays, and so financially disincentivized, that when it happens it's a really big deal. It will likely take some time for people to adjust to the change, but after a while if it becomes a commonplace thing (like on youtube as you mentioned) then it won't be a big deal anymore.

I do not understand how it encourages curation.

If we have nonlinear rewards my upvotes are worthless unless I upvote the most popular content. So it supresses curation even more so, as my voice is suppressed unless I follow the crowd.

Right now my vote as an example is worth $2. I get to give this to anyone I like. Much easier for me to actually curate and reward what I find valuable.

Flagged rewards are simply returned to the reward pool and as stated in my post those flagged rewards are up for grab by selfish and selfless upvoters alike, leaving selfish upvoters at an advantage.

Thank you for your input @blocktrades. Could you please explain how it makes the original whitepaper's argument invalid?

This is what I want to see answered. Superlinear isn't magically going to make curation happen.

Pointing to the whitepaper and appealing to Steemit, I feel like I'm listening to a BCASHer.

Is there a way to change the algorithm at this level to better encourage curation or is it only possible through the percentage ratio?

If you don't agree with people self-voting themselves then down-vote them.

Here's a non-linear system for you.

Also like @Blocktrades pointed out, Curation reward made the system non-linear. Since HF20 (first 15min forgoing of curation reward to author) there are huge economic forces at play for getting a piece of the curation which is acting to counter profit of self-voters.

BTW you're about 1 year too late to argue again't a change that is already been implemented.
I know what you meant but your title seems to completely disregard decisions and the evolution that took place during the last year.

The problem I have with the incentivized flags is that rather than be used to crowd-source for quality etc, they will become ridiculous vendetta tools. Can't really claim that the average maturity of the platform is high as if it was, a lot of the problems wouldn't exist in the first place.

I agree that the reward system should be as simple as possible, at least for the beginner stages as the current barriers to entry are already so high due to the complexity of the entire process. The complexity can still exist of course but the average user need not feel they have to worry about it at sign up unless thy are investing in.

I think that's all part of the crowdsourcing. If someone is using downvotes as an attack against otherwise valuable content, then the community can step in and upvote it. Often I've found that people who are the target of unfair downvoting can appeal to the community and come out ahead of where they started in terms of support and votes.

Also, i'm not necessarily saying that what i'm proposing will work, i don't think anyone knows that for sure. But my guess is that it would work better than adjusting numbers in some algorithm, and i think the experiment of the Steem platform as a whole is about crowdsourcing rewards more than algorithmic rewards, so I would like to give it a real shot.

I hold the same arguments as the whitepaper and I've stated in my words why so. I'm not appealing to Steemit. I've incorporated the facts and statements mention in this post because I felt they were valuable to the subject.

Even if we give 100% to curators, the best ROI remains exclusives self-upvotes.

You got a 100.00% upvote from @upmewhale courtesy of @teamsteem!

Earn 100% earning payout by delegating SP to @upmewhale. Visit http://www.upmewhale.com for details!

Often I've found that people who are the target of unfair downvoting can appeal to the community and come out ahead of where they started in terms of support and votes.

It becomes a strategy to get upvotes as I think we have seen utilized enough.

and i think the experiment of the Steem platform as a whole is about crowdsourcing rewards more than algorithmic rewards, so I would like to give it a real shot.

Don't get me wrong, I am pretty open to experimentation here as long as there is the understanding that it is going to keep getting experimented on to find a point that is best for the community as a whole. No solution is ever going to be perfect so in my eyes, the experimentation doesn't end.

This could change through oracles though?

Flagging doesn't solve the issue, as the flagged rewards are simply returned to the reward pool for anyone to grab, selfish and selfless upvoters alike.

Steem is always evolving and changes aren't set in stone.

Possibly.

They're up for grab for the next least selfish self-voters. The most likely contender for countering selfvoting is independent flagging pool along with burning of flagged reward, which I guess due to technical implementation difficulty doesn't have much traction.

I agree with the above statement exactly it's ah nice statement @teamsteem

Alright, to answer your above question to blocktrade, it doesn't make the whitpaper invalid. It just make your title lose meaning. It's not actually linear and never has been.

They're up for grab for the next least selfish self-voters.

Indeed. It's a loophole with serious issues as I've stated.

The most likely contender for countering selfvoting is independent flagging pool along with burning of flagged reward

Leaving the rest for grab for the next least selfish self-voters leaving the same loophole open as I understand it.

They would get all the rewards by focusing their upvotes. they would do the opposite and form cartells

Downvoted for pushing your post about 400$ above the top post.

Fair point but it doesn't invalidate my overall argument.

I share some of your frustrations.

I have vested interest in Steem and thus I'm still looking to improve it to the best of my ability. I appreciate your input @freeborangel

I hadn't calculated how much I've put into the bots. Also, there are some organic votes. Could you refund me that I send to @promotbot?

"next least selfish" = Not selfish.

Not sure how you understand it otherwise.

It doesn't put potential abusers at a disadvantage.

The reason why content is not rewarded right now is because

people are creatures that evolved to self-preserve and thus on a whole or average, will seek to get the most for themselves i.e. best ROI. Selflessness is not the default behavior even though it's not necessarily uncommon in many situations.

The current model advantages the selfish while disadvantaging the selfless. The selfish SP owners will self-upvote as much as possible while the selfless upvote will see their ROI/influence/wealth diminish at the expense of the selfish.

I just hope that good will prevail for the good of steem community, nothing more to say @teamsteem

May God bless you all and give you more wisdom and upholding justice.

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The existing non-linearity already gives an incentive to curators to vote on posts that other people will also likely vote on rather than simply self-voting.

The reason this doesn't work well in practice is at least in part to the fact that most of the rewards go to the author rather than the curators under the current rules.

The other problem is few people understand the real rules which are essentially undocumented and end up fighting shadows.

"In order to realign incentives and discourage individuals from simply voting for themselves, money must be distributed in a nonlinear manner."

The premises you’re working from appear different from most. Contrary to the post, reality is that rewards are still non linear today via dust, human appreciation for contributions, and curation.

Beyond that, it’s my philosophy that it’s important to stay open minded and adaptable while building a currency and that is why I described Steem as an Experiment in the Whitepaper.

Refunded, One solution to the problem of having your post at the top for the next 3 days would be to make it dynamic by updating it to maybe include the best reply you're received.

It may help to improve the algorithm at this level, but not if percentages aren't changed, because at 25% shared between all curators and 75% going to the author, the curators are mostly fighting for table scraps.

What? That makes no sense at all to me. Maybe you could explain further.

lulz, right... like it has been and always will be.

Ownership of STEEM tokens is highly concentrated in the hands of only a few dozen early miners.

And they sing the mantra, "money talks and bullshit walks" ...

I am sure, "Destiny" will come with its own SMT. Maybe that's the reason our leader is powering down like there is no tomorrow. Just because STEEM is dying... ohhh not because of a failed proof of concept, or bad luck, but by design.

STEEM will crater and never recover.

Let's see what happends when SMT are here.

Ohhh and who are these Whales? who are these Witnesses? Are they all part of the management team?

I disagree, this just gives more powerful to large SP selfvoters, it prevents nothing.

yes it does

Flagged for abusing bid bots.

Superlinear reward encourages some curation as

It doesn't and if you read the above section of the whitepaper carefully, no such claim is made:

money must be distributed in a nonlinear manner

This states a necessary but not sufficient condition. The white paper does not claim that superlinear alone is sufficient to achieve curation, in fact it states precisely the opposite because it explains the need for downvotes to prevent collusion (a somewhat technical term, but in this context, it means more SP working together to increase the payout of content above its merits; somewhat different from the implied English meaning since there is no requirement for multiple actors, only an increased amount of SP working to self-reward).

Unfortunately the white paper got some of this wrong. It describes the crab bucket model where stakeholders are supposed to pull down others who try to collude to extract rewards. However, in the real world, we have seen that most stakeholders would rather see to their own reward earnings rather than 'waste' vote power pulling others down. The psychology may be valid, but the cost of downvoting is just too high for psychology to override economics here.

Crowdsourced downvotes as described by @yabapmatt also distribute rewards in a non-linear fashion, as follows. If 100% upvote and no one downvotes, the reward is 100% relative to the amount of voting power used. If 80% upvote and 20% downvote, the reward is 75% relative to the amount of voting power used. This is non-linear and satisfies the necessary condition of the white paper. This assumes that downvotes don't deplete upvote power as in the @cervantes/@kevonwong/etc. proposal. If they do then the reward is 60%, but either way, still non-linear.

We think that is a better approach. I wouldn't flat out rule out some superlinear (indeed we have one at my urging in HF20 with the new treatment of dust votes at the very low end), but n^2 doesn't look like a good solution and other solutions are underdeveloped (and, quite possibly, unnecessary).

I would be happy to trial the 50/50 as you know, especially after playing a little on Smoke.io and watching large accounts post much less and spread more. I still believe at this stage of the platform's life cycle, experimentation will reap much larger future gains than the possible short-term losses through errors made.

If there is a decent framework set up that allows for short trials (a couple months) with systematic monitoring and adjustment proposals (revert if absolutely necessary), then the possibility to develop robust solutions is increased. It seems that everyone is looking for a solution to commit to that fixes it all, and there is far too much complexity and unknown to likely find that solution at this point.

Of course it does. They are more likely to be downvoted. Even if it isn't 100% guaranteed it pushes their incentives toward better (less likely to be downvoted) behavior

Flagged rewards are simply returned to the reward pool and as stated in my post those flagged rewards selfish and selfless upvoters alike, leaving selfish upvoters at an advantage

Not true. Those second round of selfish voters are also more likely to be downvoted. You have to look at this as a large economy, not individual steps. The first downvote of a selfish voter puts the rewards back in the pool but that doesn't mean selfish and selfless voters are on then equal footing. The downvotes can continue to follow selfish voters indefinitely.

The result is likely to be an equilibrium with far less selfish voting, not only because selfish voters get downvoted, returning those rewards to the pool, but because crowdsourced downvotes change the incentives on selfish voting in the first place. It will not be perfect (nohting is) but it will likely be far better, with more for the pool going to value adding activities.

Flags aren't really incentivized in this proposal (we don't know of a good method to do that even if we wanted to), they just stop being so costly. You still earn essentially nothing by downvoting. Your other content does go up every so slightly slightly in payout all else being equal, but it is quite negligible (and your other content too can be downvoted if don't have sufficient merit)

Name calling isn't helpful

Actually not, at that point it doesn't matter what you vote on, you get the same rewards. It comes down to pay-to-vote.

Its actually a disadvantage since it uses up more RC

It's not actually linear and never has been.

Isn't your overall argument that you're against linear reward?

Bad choice of words. Less-disincentivized. Don't get me wrong, I am in support of trying it as I would like to see how it plays out. I understand that people fear flags and that should change (my first flag was from you a very long time ago :D ) and I would hope that it would make people think twice or up their standards before boosting nonsense.

There is no point discussing forever something that can be trialed quite cheaply. Work or not, either way, we would have better knowledge going forward instead of only predictions.

https://steemit.com/steem/@transisto/improving-negative-curation-a-downvote-button-vs-flag-explained-condenser

https://steemit.com/steem/@transisto/separate-downvoting-power-pool-concept-visualized

Linear in reward to how rshares allocated to author rewards are calculated.

Yes, I don't expect everything to magically work on the first try. But I think we can see some decent improvement even in the short term.

I really appreciate your inputs!

it explains the need for downvotes to prevent collusion

I implied this as it's implied by the whitepaper.

that most stakeholders would rather see to their own reward earngs rather than 'waste' vote power pulling others down.

This isn't a binary thing. It's part of some very complex ever-changing dynamics. At some point, the bulk of the stakeholders even agreed to refrain from voting to a large extent forgoing a lot of rewards.

Crowdsourced downvotes as described by @yabapmatt also distribute rewards in a non-linear fashion, as follows. If 100% upvote and no one downvotes, the reward is 100% relative to the amount of voting power used. If 80% upvote and 20% downvote, the reward is 75% relative to the amount of voting power used.

Very interesting solution. I hadn't understood it correctly so I'm very grateful for the way you've described it. My first impression is that it's a solution I could very be in favor of.

Those second round of selfish voters are also more likely to be downvoted.

True but under linear reward, the rewards returned would represent a growing % of the reward pool with ever-growing incentive to defect. If downvotes are crowdsourced my statement is irrelevant.

True but under linear reward, the rewards returned would represent a growing % of the reward pool with ever-growing incentive to defect.

Under crowdsourced flags, this isn't so.

I'll consider updating my post. I didn't have maligned intentions. Using bid-bot is quite fastidious and I simply wanted it to be up there not way up there like it ended up. I used all the bots and should have been more careful and calculated the total...

I'm fairly new here but I think as a newbie you need the ability to upvote yourself in the beginning as a means to build yourself up. Maybe there should be a monetary cutoff switch where at some point you can't upvote yourself based on your own sp.

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I'm open to any solutions that resolve the current situation. I'm interested to hear more on this type of solution involving the current % allocated to curators.

Correct, the highest voting return is to sell your vote because you get the curation value of the vote + money on top of it. Self voting isn't as good, which is why some of the most flagrant self voters moved over to bidbots and got a better return there.

I don't think changing curation rules or amounts will change much. The only real option is community led downvotes of socially and arbitrarily deemed undesirable content.

I agree. I had to read @aggroed's comment to understand yours.

The curators are not fighting for scraps, 25% is a pretty decent amount to get. Sure if we would compare it to just self vote it may seem like scraps. But what is a person getting when they curate? They get the leverage of potential to build up Trust and Relationships with a specific person.

By showing you share some of your influence to someone else instead of self voting. The Tokens are never the real leverage. Relationships and Network potential that is the real value. This all comes down to build up Trust with other humans. It's not really about the Tokens. The Tokens works just as blood or electricity.

Indeed it's none linear via dust. I'm not arguing against this.

Indeed Steem is an experiment and we should remain open minded. I haven't argued against this either.

You haven't argued against what I've argued. Your comment doesn't answer the questions my post is raising.

Crowd-sourced? Compared to what?

It's a great experiment. Will take many years to see how it will play out. One big thing that I have noticed is that when something get's backed by a large stake holder that builds up massive trust in the network. That is when magic happens. These I trust you moments that happens from time to time. That is real wealth. Solid networks of deep Trust.

That will say targeted leverage is what seems to make the best moves in a network. Spreading everything too thin, no trust being created. A few empowered brave souls can move waters. People with big dreams that get leverage. Some are better than others to create leverage effects.

So for example my experience with being a content creator and get leverage from dtube every upvote creates a stronger "I trust you" network effect. It creates massive loyalty in the long term perspective. This is not something that can be looked at in ROI since it's a long game strategy. But the fruits and ROI from that will take a longer time to see. As Steem is just 2 and soon 3 years old I feel people are too fast to come to conclusions about the network. So being open minded is what I also try to be.

I see the Steem Blockchain as an experiment in creating Trust between various nodes in a network. And that it can only survive if the nodes starts to Trust and Listen to each other to create a truly empowered node network. But then people have to see the real value which is relationships and loyalty and having bigger visions. Looking beyond wealth. A very powerful Trust network and Tokens wouldn't even be needed after a while. Since the vision would be higher and more evolved where to take things.

I see stake holders at this moment worry about ROI for the moment which makes me question their long term views if they worry about ROI for the moment it does seem like they are not looking at the longer perspective of 5-10 years down the line. Looking at every moment in ROI terms makes human relationships into a small thing. This movement is bigger than short term profits that is a big focus for many. Humans need sort of to evolve into something that looks beyond the short term.

Thanks again for a great whitepaper and Steem experiment!

I agree with the underlying principal of what youre saying, I specifcally find 3 to 5 new users every day (new to me not new to steem) and make sure I comment and interact with them along with upvote any human meaningful posts I see.

So I don't think the network needs any code changes in regards to this issue, just maybe some better networking from the users.

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You haven't argued against what I've argued. Your comment doesn't answer the questions my post is raising.

Why should I answer anything here, especially to the OP where the logic is broken? I’ve talked about these Economics in many places over years on Steem, even I suppose with you, and here you are stiff-arming (expecting?) (demanding?) responses and different opinions from the same ol folks.

Here’s one: https://steemit.com/steem/@ned/re-dana-edwards-re-ned-steem-needs-you-20181017t014522825z

I'M really not sure I understood their crowdsource concept correctly but if so, flags would have a separate pool and would be non-linear.

Yes by the design the self-voting, or selling of votes is standard thing to do on steem. Its a proof of stake system. Stake = reward.

Steem has been designed this way. Your approach would not change this fact at all but simply make it so that only the richest get all the rewards.

Currently 1x stake gives everyone 1x reward.

You propose that all of the rewards goes to a few whales. How does that help? How would this spread coins among more users?

How is this helpful for the purpose of all?

So overall I agree with you we need to make this better, especially make it so that more content producers get more rewards. But I believe your proposal is counterproductive

You are free to answer anything you wish. Me saying: "You're not answering the question" is me stating my mind in a very neutral manner and in no way stiff-arming anyone.

I think it would have been logical for Steemit Inc to rebut their own statement in regard to linear reward to which I haven't seen any.

Most witnesses have indirectly answered the first question I've asked as reported by cervantes' post. The second question has been unanswered by most.

It's one thing to say my logic is broken and I'm not infallible but I haven't seen a rebuttal that I find valid (in regard to the current system advantaging "freeloaders") and thus why I'm standing up to say so. I remain open to being proved wrong.

That's your quote below.

That super linear rewards become about Networking instead of Content, and disturb new users by making the system incomprehensible, makes it difficult for me to want to go back to. That said — if the entire community wanted it — I am listening.

I've never written a post about the subject at hand and thus why I wanted to do it and make my stance as clear as possible.

This is a screenshot of Steemwhales taken on May 21, 2017. It shows the best-paid author of the last 7 days for that period.

https://i.imgur.com/PADNjWz.png

This was prior to linear reward. None of the people on the list were part of the original miners. There was an ongoing distribution of rewards prior to linear reward. It was even more pronounced than today.

Source:
http://web.archive.org/web/20170601000000*/https://steemwhales.com/trending/

Changing the curation/author mix reduces the heavy lifting that downvotes have to do. It takes less downvoting to push self-voting or vote-selling down to 50% than to 25%. There could also likely be more collateral damage with the latter. That said, downvotes alone without changing the split may still work. The question comes down to: 1) degree of relying on altruism since they are still not incentivized, 2) effect of remaining downvote discouragements such as retaliation or social reputation, 3) if the free downvote power is smaller than the upvote power there may not be enough to perform more heavy lifting.

Still, it could work.

You mean like all of your rip-off shit posts @transisto?

This isn't a binary thing. It's part of some very complex ever-changing dynamics.

We have two and half years of experience across various other tweaks in the reward system to see basically the same result. Stakeholders, by and large, don't want to waste their valuable earning potential on downvotes or not voting (there are always exceptions but they are precisely that).

At some point, the bulk of the stakeholders even agreed to refrain from voting to a large extent forgoing a lot of rewards.

Yes it was me (along with abit) who organized and promoted that so I'm quite aware of it. Having been there, I can tell you it wasn't sustainable. Even if abit and I were willing to continue doing what we were doing indefinitely, the other major stakeholders were not, and in the place of the largest stakeholders, the next largest were starting to do the same thing.

That sort of crab bucket approach does not work if downvotes are too expensive. Other than that, it could very well work. I've even said that with cheap downvotes n^2 could work. It might produce different results than what many in the community want in terms of reward distribution, but it might be (probably would be) a whole lot better than what we saw with n^2 and no cheap downvotes.

I agree with most of the points you've made and our disagreements aren't fundamental disagreements.

I wanted to state my truth as clear as possible. The selfless are losing some ROI to the selfish in a flawed system.

Thank you for the discussion.

Selfishness is not a long term successful approach. Since it's not sustainable. The selfless are losing in the short term frame yes. But they can build up stronger relationships that lasts for a life time. In the end the goal is to use Tokens to produce higher leverage by investing in human brains that think big and long term.

This space needs to evolve into digital jobs eventually if you truly want to maximise ROI. At the moment since it's such a new field everyone is just trying to do some blogging with random stuff. More organisation is needed. Niches + Community systems. And moderators that own various Niches would be an interesting experiment. People focusing on niches that they love. Therefore everyone is getting more of what they want.

Curation isn't worth it.

Flagging isn't worth it.

Posting isn't worth it.

Self-voting is frowned upon (and not worth it for most).

Why should anyone buy Steem? And an even better question, why should anyone convert to Steem Power?

The original Steem Whitepaper states:

"If every voter defects by voting for themselves then no currency will end up distributed and the currency as a whole will fail to gain network effect."

It then argues:

"In order to realign incentives and discourage individuals from simply voting for themselves, money must be distributed in a nonlinear manner."

Yeah, there's a point here. The point is to circulate/distribute the currency thus create a network effect, right?

Hello @teamsteem
My name is @pitar
I came out with this

Please encourage me

https://youtu.be/I9FUMcO9CF0

I need more steem to do better one that gonna cover all..

God bless you @teamsteem

I think so too, Bro! the currency should be circulating and so multiplying.

Hello @teamsteem
My name is @pitar
I came out with this

The song is dedicated to steemjet community

Please encourage me

https://youtu.be/I9FUMcO9CF0

I need more steem to do better one that gonna cover all..

God bless you @teamsteem

Hello @teamsteem
My name is @pitar
I came out with this

The song is dedicated to steemjet community

Please encourage me

https://youtu.be/I9FUMcO9CF0

I need more steem to do better one that gonna cover all..

God bless steem
God bless you @teamsteem

Teamsteem, i am here to have a dialog with you.

That is why directly i went into the question you asked and answered it. I respect and love you and very much care about this topic. I am not here to fight with you (like most of the time we do on social media).

I try to explain that I understand your concern and point of view and then explain why mine differes. In order for this to be productive i need you to also answer questions I pose.

Now let me get back to your point, which if I understand correctly is this:

When we had non-linear rewards the top earnes earned all of it via content cs today most of the rewards goes out via bots.

Here is what my issue with this is. It does not address the points that I made before: the rewards are unfair and everything is going to few addresses.

Ie look at kingcrown, he still makes a ton of rewards today, but he wont dominate as much.

But the most important part of the rewards is the trail and how much it makes relative to the trail.

That is what creates distribution usage and ultimately value for all, whoch is what we both care about.

So what are your thoughts on the unfairness?

Hi @teamsteem, I think that it is good that you raise N^2 vs linear debate again. The survey conducted by @cervantes indicates that the top witnesses are against N^1.3 (mild super-linear) but it wasn't discussed in much depth in that post.

Before too much is thrown around regarding solutions. The problem/s we need to solve need to be clearly stated otherwise the average Steemium is going to question what all the fuss is about. What would help would be a post clearly stating the problems. Are we talking about a rewards problem? Quality of content problem? User interface problem? Content discovery problem? Flow of information problem? All of the above or some of the above. I believe it is a mixture of all of the above.

People generally try to get the highest rewards for the least amount of work. The low effort options, at the moment, are more rewarding than the higher effort options such as creating content and manual curation. Rewards should align to value added to the community. That is just a very brief summary of what I think the problem/s are. This should be articulated a lot further. Once the problem/s are clearly articulated (i.e. majority of the users can understand the problems). We should discuss possible approaches and solutions.

Mostly likely a combination of solutions are required. 50/50 curation split plus separate pool for downvotes appears quite popular with witnesses and fairly split amongst users. You discuss N^2 rewards as a response to 'selfish behaviour'. All these are Steem solutions. The weaknesses of the UI has not been discussed in combination with Steem solutions. There is a lot that can be done with a user interface. Steempeak has already taken a step forward with the use of saved topics, trails and users.

It would be good to look at as many possible solutions and scenarios and how they would work together to solve problems that have been clearly identified and understood by the majority.

good point! Steemians must help build, establish, grow and multiply the crypto world. at the end of the way, we all will benefit from this.

yes, we really should!

Since this very basic observation seems to be ignored, there must be some sort of reference debunking what I'm saying (superlinear makes self voting more effective for large stakeholders, all else being equal). Someone kindly provide me with it. Or possibly a simple thing stating that I'm not looking at the right thing at all.

Best of all is to sell to your vote to someone before the mega bid-bots upvote. You get paid for the vote as well as frontrun for extra curation. You also don't need to have your SP tied up in a bid-bot.

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I downvote over-rewarded posts all the time. I leave a little comment giving my reasons. I sometimes a get a downvote back on the comment. I use decline payout on my comments for protection. It works pretty well.

If they downvote my comment, they are using Voting Power on me instead of themselves. They are inflicting damage on themselves without even thinking about it.

You earned this resteem and vote.🇨🇦

Thank you for your very eloquent and on point contribution.

Dear @ned , a bit off-topic and alhough I am a small minnow here on Steemit I am hoping your can answer this:

WHY was the viewcount (eyeball) feature that use to be near the other indicators for our posts (such as upvote, votes, comments) regarding our post was REMOVED a few months back?

I've asked many witnesses but none could tell me why Steemit decided to do this.

This really puzzles and dissapoints me (along with countless other Steemians), as it was the BEST indicator to see how many people were actually having a look at our posts.

I see absolutely no advantage of this feature having being removed (unless I am missing something), as it certainly didn't take up much space on the screen.

Any possibility of getting this feature (post view count) back?

Other than that I love this platform and am very grateful for all you guys do for us.

Sincerely,

@libertyacademy

Hey @ned, have you thought about ditching 'Trending' as the front page of Steemit. Maybe use the tags with nice thumbnails as the first thing newcomers see instead. I'm sure people come to Steem with particular interests in mind. The 'All Tags' trending page does not really serve that purpose.

If your focus is 'Destiny', you could use that approach with communities.

the only get rich here is the bots. that's the reality, just saying

Yes this was addressed many times before, I don't know why this keeps getting rehashed. What steem really needs is not non linear rewards, but account based voting. In addition I'm calling for account based witness voting, to make it much more decentralized that it is now.

Nonlinear rewards can be gamed by dividing your SP up into a bunch of different accounts. you're not going to stop self upvoting. What we really need is account based voting with accounts verified by oracles, which is coming anyway I believe.

I do very much respect your thoughtful inputs. I'm sorry if my answer might have seemed clumsy. I can understand why.

I try to remain focus on what I'm trying to convey and I try not to be sidetracked from it.

I'm for any solution. What I don't want are apathy and stagnation.
I do think there's more than one solution. I'm open to other solution.

To answer your question about unfairness, under superlinear, the rules are the same for everyone. So in that regard, this is fair. Now as far as to whom the rewards are allocated, that is decided by consensus. The majority of the rewards will be allocated to whom create the most consensus.

Superlinear rewards close the loophole which is allowing freeloaders to "freeload". Freeloaders freeload at the expense of everyone, small and large shareholders alike. This is very unfair.

Looking at someone who automates 10 posts a day with 0 work on his part and seeing them making the best ROI while others are working their ass off for a lesser ROI is unfair.

This is what I'm looking to solve. I'm open to all suggestions as I've said. The current model is bogus.

support my writings by visiting my blog

Ok, so you disagree with my statement that non-linear is not unfair and instead find the existing solution unfair.

Also you do not mind very few dominating consensus in the reward distribution. But the fact that it is easy to get free or cheap rewards is something you do dislike.

Nice

Freeloaders freeload at the expense of everyone

The main problem with your argument is that this statement is false. Self-voters gain rewards from their own stake and a nice bonus from people who hold Steem without upvoting with it, which those people would lose in any case. They don't take rewards from anyone else.

You see them with a "high relative ROI" but that's because you're only valuing a single output from the non-self-voters. If you value both outputs - the personal return and the extrinsic value of the outgoing vote - the non-self-vote's ROI is substantially higher. Of course since it's a personal subjective value it's harder to count, but it exists.

This is demonstrated by the fact that people voluntarily cast them. We're not all stupid; we simply value the socio-cultural and interpersonal reward portion of our outgoing vote more than the financial value of casting it on ourselves.

This is also why 50/50 curation reduces the value of voluntarily-cast votes.

Enough said... agreed completely, pay to play this inflation/dilution game to break even if you are insane enough to author/curate 24h a day, 365 days a year...

Why should anyone buy into steem or smt?

Can someone from "The Management Team" answer this question?

Yes a solution to this must be there so that rather self voting the chance to the small accounts should also be provided or else steemit will a platform where either you should have huge money to buy steem power or a friend who owns it, even i am was seeking for the solution lets see what can be the solution.

Posted using Partiko Android

I came up with the idea of independent flagging pool, Here's something I posted about it.

https://steemit.com/steem/@transisto/separate-downvoting-power-pool-concept-visualized

There is only one user involved when down-voting so there is no "crowd" per se.

Hi @teamsteem,

I made a full post in reply to your question: post

@ned @libertyacademy

WHY was the viewcount (eyeball) feature that use to be near the other indicators for our posts (such as upvote, votes, comments) regarding our post was REMOVED a few months back?

wow. That would be great to see. I am also new to this platform. Writing and Creating. Id like to see what my efforts are doing traffic wise, as votes are minimal.

A pixel tracking could do this, very easy to implement.

Pay more for curators than authors and people will vote for others instead.

This might be the reason why I get 200 upvotes before I use the bid bots !

I do buy steem every week because it's worth it, for 300 bucks you can be on the trending page and be viewed by everyone.

Hi, @teamsteem!

You just got a 0.3% upvote from SteemPlus!
To get higher upvotes, earn more SteemPlus Points (SPP). On your Steemit wallet, check your SPP balance and click on "How to earn SPP?" to find out all the ways to earn.
If you're not using SteemPlus yet, please check our last posts in here to see the many ways in which SteemPlus can improve your Steem experience on Steemit and Busy.

To reiterate for those that missed it (which appears to be almost everyone) -

As I stated in the comments under @Trafalgar's post, I have a solution to the bid bot issue that steps on no-one's toes and cannot really be circumvented. I wrote about it here. By giving every steem user the ability to mute the EFFECT of votes by allowing them to mute VOTERS - we allow everyone to block out the effects of bots while also empowering users to see more of what they want/need to see. This would also enhance the effectiveness of good curators too since their work would be more visible to those who care and they can then both benefit from their work by reading posts they discover and also then upvote them. This facilitates proof of brain in a pure way that does not involve overpowering anyone and that actually empowers people more than they have been. Empowerment is what is needed here.

I also commented that I see an issue with free downvoting in that the imbalance among user's Steem Power holdings means that malicious whales could literally shut down a large amount of the reward activity for the entire network, which would in turn boost their own earnings. Ultimately, power imbalance that can limit exposure is a problem when exposure is the proposed way to gain power and rectify the balance. This is a fundamental flaw in capitalism too, in the sense that new users (or new born babies) have to join in an old game where monopoly is already established. It's fine to say 'work hard and you can be big too', but in reality that's not how things play out due to the nature of the weighting involved and the ability of the biggest to crush the smallest with little incentive financially for them not to do so. The idea that the big whales who act selfishly to the point of destroying the network would change before they actually do destroy the network, presupposes a level of intelligence and perceptiveness/care on their part about such things - which is already possibly evidenced to be in short supply by the fact that they would have taken things to that point.

Every point in all of this is unique and we need to dive deeply into every point to fully understand it and reach the best outcome. Soundbytes jut can't cut it here. However, I will say that options that empower without overpowering anyone are always helpful.

I’m just a minnow.
I have been observing some of the accounts on steemit. People with high steem power would want minnows votes but only a minority upvote to the comments made by minnows even if they are good comments. They preserve their vote power and sell their votes. This is unethical and very wrong.
I used to get very annoyed and frustrated until i came across posts by @trafalgar and @holm that the people are not the ones to blame but the steemit economic system is flawed.
Vote buying, vote selling and self voting should be restricted or stopped if possible.

Thanks for your post

Very gooD read, right now if you don’t self vote you are “losing” to everyone else.

In order to realign incentives and discourage individuals from simply voting for themselves, money must be distributed in a nonlinear manner.

Which implies that Self voting is a losing strategy if curve is non-linear

But then... if we just look at what happens under n^x with x>1 reward schemes, we realize that actually, if everyone self-votes, then this statement is false. It's true for the minnows who have less than the 'average stake', but it's false for all the whales who will earn more than under linear rewards. So 1. False

Under linear rewards, if everyone self-votes and we ignore witness rewards, STEEM's distribution becomes similar to a 100% PoS system like many others, which is arguably more fair (self-voting is only a break-even strategy, not a winning one).

I believe the way everyone thinks about this issue to be biased by steemit developers. The way STEEM has been coded makes the need for a 'reward curve'. What if we just changed the distribution algorithm in the first place instead of wanting to change the 'curve' that plugs into the existing algorithm?

Who would waste so much time for an $11k account? That's my question to you.

Then what's the point of buying Steem? So you can reward others? That's fucking stupid.

@heimindanger is bigot trash who refers to people as "fag". Look at his comment history and you'll see just what a piece of shit he truly is!!

In order to realign incentives and discourage individuals from simply voting for themselves, money must be distributed in a nonlinear manner.

Which implies that Self voting is a losing strategy if curve is non-linear

But then... if we just look at what happens under n^x with x>1 reward schemes, we realize that actually, if everyone self-votes, then this statement is false. It's true for the minnows who have less than the 'average stake', but it's false for all the whales who will earn more than under linear rewards. So 1. False

Under linear rewards, if everyone self-votes and we ignore witness rewards, STEEM's distribution becomes similar to a 100% PoS system like many others, which is arguably more fair (self-voting is only a break-even strategy, not a winning one).

I believe the way everyone thinks about this issue to be biased by steemit developers. The way STEEM has been coded makes the need for a 'reward curve'. What if we just changed the distribution algorithm in the first place instead of wanting to change the 'curve' that plugs into the existing algorithm?

reposted comment because first one downvoted by facists

Keep on downvoting me... I'll just keep on reposting. Not only I ruined your blog but now I also ruin your VP.

That's a good point but aren't you gaining by curating with a higher SP?

Posted using Partiko Android

You haven't ruined shit.

I make more in a week than you will make in a year, bigot trash.

You keep talking that game while knowing you're getting trolled like the bitch your mom is.

Bernie after I killed his blog
https://media1.tenor.com/images/97890848d19e212f6530944dc6d21229/tenor.gif?itemid=6118886

My blog isn't dead. I sill have far more real followers than your accounts combined.

How pathetic is that? You're the one too scared to post on any of them.

@heimindanger is bigot trash who refers to people as "fag". Look at his comment history and you'll see just what a piece of shit he truly is!!

https://i.imgur.com/GUNraBp.png

https://i.imgur.com/Gq4jl8u.png

your accounts combined xD

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/b2/31/c8/b231c8dabb7ca71581d1c853373aee29--trap-queen-relationship-problems.jpg

I said real followers. Not a bunch of fake, dead accounts.

I didn't realize you were a bigot AND retarded...

You're also missing ~150 accounts of mine. Again, retarded.

Fake accounts? LOL nice irrefutable argument bro

And you know between me and you that if there was a 'buy steem followers' service, I wouldn't touch it, while you'd be using it daily and maybe even running it yourself.

You are an hypocritical douche sir

And your blog sucks too since I ruined it

and still no one cares about your shit posts

Honestly, I'm torn about the issue because I understand the argument both ways. What are your thoughts on it?

Posted using Partiko Android

Yea, definitely don't include the word "dead" in there since you know 95%+ of those accounts are no longer in use.

You're pathetic. My blog is just as amazing today as it was a month or a year ago and still receives far more engagement than ANYTHING you ever produce on here.

Pathetic cuck. Keep going, you're only making me look better.

And you better believe I'd create such a service, beats being a poor schlub like yourself. You can't even create anything that generates income, how fucking pathetic is that?

P.S. - You use bid bots and claim you're against those as well. I'd guess you would use such a service. Hypocritical bigot trash.

@heimindanger is bigot trash who refers to people as "fag". Look at his comment history and you'll see just what a piece of shit he truly is!!

This is only ONE example, there are more in his comments.

Barely. Those rewards are negligible.

Well look I'm not a technical guy so I don't know all the in's and out's about this crypto but maybe the curation reward should be increased to entyce people to do that instead. I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud.

Posted using Partiko Android

Comparing your blog to dtube is insane dude. Your blog is nothing. You don't even host it yourself, it goes through steemit.com servers on Amazon East coast infrastructure xD.

If ned wanted to (he's a much wiser person than me), he could just disable your blog on steemit.com, and it would be dead instantly. Funny thing is that you are trying to collect witness votes, so you are running a node, so you could do it, but its TOO HARD for useless people like you. Node is running and collecting coins, why the fuck would you do more, eh?

You don't have more comments or views than any teenage girl who would start streaming fortnite games on twitch today. Get real man ... You seem so frustrated when I say your blog is dead... Maybe try to go out sometimes, find new hobbies, meet new people or something? And stop caring so much about your shitty blog on a platform where everyone hates you.

You say I'm such a piece of shit and frustrated, yet look at all the time you spend arguing with me and attempting to troll me.

The fact of the matter is that I do not care about Steemit or my blog and it's simply an outlet for posting trash and trolling children like you. I don't even need it to make money! I'm actually making MORE by not posting.

Maybe you're just butthurt I ended up in a coindesk article and your precious dtube has NEVER gotten any recognition??

Again, you're the one wasting time on someone you consider to be so pathetic. Most would agree that you are in fact the one who is frustrated and getting trolled like a little bitch.

Keep arguing with me, you're just proving my point about how pathetic your sad little life is.

Well, seems odd to me seems you can't stop yourself from answering quickly and spending a lot of VP downvoting me whenever I highlight how ruined and pathetic your blog is...

Anyway if that's really how you think, then this fiasco will last for a long time, probably forever...

If in any case and for any reason you want me to stop raping your blog, feel free to delegate 10% of your stake to @dtube (to compensate for the recent defamation against it), as well as another 10% of your stake to @fulltimegeek, to help him in his positive efforts to support real humans on this chain, for a duration of at least 6 months.

It’s funny you do exactly what you accuse me of.

Those votes I use on you are NOTHING as you can see from my income.

Again, you’re having 0 effect on my blog but nice attempt at blackmailing me.

Fuck, you’re pathetic...posts about your shit site will be increasing in frequency and distribution.

posts about your shit site will be increasing in frequency and distribution.

Thank you. Please use your money to bid bot them

Oh you won’t be thanking me, I assure you.

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You're singling out some of my statements. I've presented an argument from Steemit Inc and the original whitepaper as to why linear rewards are fundamentally flawed. They never rebutted their own argument. Don't you think they should rebut it?

Don't you think there needs to be a mechanism to prevent someone to simply self-upvote and get the best ROI.

Also you do not mind very few dominating consensus in the reward distribution.

Everything is relative to another. This is preferable than giving an unfair advantage to the exclusive self-upvoter. In proof-of-brain the one who makes the best ROI currently are those who don't engage in proof-of-brain. They will garner ever more influence.

Nonlinear rewards can be gamed by dividing your SP up into a bunch of different accounts.

Incorrect as pointed out by @smooth.

Under superlinear the majority of rewards are distributed through consensus not self-upvote. This is what we had observed. You can verify this through old screenshots of steemwhales.

People who want to influence the distribution of the rewards.

suggestions:

• link the voting influence of the lowest powered account to the higheat using a more balanced ratio, I recommend 5:1.

• obtain self votes by voting on others, 1:1 ratio.

• implement a vote to consume design so that users must first upvote content before having full access.

• remove the 6 day payout limit, this insured that good quality content can be supported by future visitors and will favor quality over quantity.

• implement notifications for unreplied comments and replies.

• allow voting to maximum daily allowance, allowing users to use maximum daily voting power on a single piece of content. This will cut down on spam voting.

i’d love to read what’s you opinion on my comment as it’ll help me in understanding the situation more and support me in more targeted and constructive thinking to resolve the current challenges.

That is absolutely absurd. $11k has such minimal influence...

You cannot "monetize" or "incentivize" the creation of "quality" content.

Period. No matter how much One tinkers with rewards, whether linear or not, it does nothing to set the standards necessary to achieve any of the goals outlined in the whitepaper. Curation is not about achieving quality, it's about creating an addiction in the users of Steemit. @ned, why don't you tell these people about your psychological goals for the Steemit platform? Do they know you have a degree in Psychology as well as Economics?

Did anybody bother to read this part of the whitepaper?

The impact of this voting and payout distribution is
to offer large bounties for good content while still
rewarding smaller players for their long-tail contribu-
tion.
The economic effect of this is similar to a lottery
where people overestimate their probability of getting
votes and thus do more work than the expected value
of their reward, thereby maximizing the total amount
of work performed in service of the community. The fact that “everyone wins something” plays on the same psychology that casinos use to keep people gambling. In other words, small rewards help reinforce
the idea that it is possible to earn bigger rewards.

Steemit is not about the curation of quality content, and no type of reward system will change that.

Quality Cannot Exist Without Standards

So you are saying that basically before linear rewards, people were self-voting less than now? That seems true from observation, but a lot of other economical changes happened at the same time than linear rewards. The powerdown time was changed for example too.

Also, I suppose you consider bidbot delegation schemes to be the same than self-voting, and the bidbot industry started to exist because of linear rewards (it became easier to code), however I don't see how they would go away today if we re-changed, they would just adapt their code, and as they are the biggest whales on the network today, they would profit the most from the change.

So I'm not even sure the observation is linked with the HF17 (or was it 18?) econ changes, maybe it's just that something else developped at the same time that turned the network toxic and induced people to defend their stake by self-voting more.

regardless of what side of the fence people are on with this topic it's encouraging dialogue/debate and interaction and I picked it as a featured post in the teamgood curation nation newsletter
thanks for the good you do on here and dialogue promotion

Leaving unsolicited links on other people's posts is considered rude, and possibly spam, particularly with the number of phishing scams out there.

I read this post almost twice to understand perfectly because this topic is new for me.

Thanks for sharing @teamsteem

☺️☺️☺️☺️☺️☺️☺️👏👏👏👏👏

I will have to apologize, we are having a bit of a "bad hair day". Perhaps I could suggest trying to ask the question on another day. We are running late for the spa appointment. To answer your question, we will never stop rewarding the upper class here in a linear fashion or else they would pull all their money out and the whole experiment would collapse in on its self like a haircut with no layers. Linear rewards are the styling gel that holds us togeather.

A very good explanation. Good information learnt from this post friend. Good one.

nice.

Me ayudan para comprarme un juego? Cuesta super poco. Plis soy pobre y no tengo dinero para comprar

i heard it wasnt accurate.. its possible that spiders and search engine bots could easily mess with the real numbers.. and indeed it could be abused by people to artificially inflate it.. just a guess really as im not sure if the views included page loads from people without accounts.

nice post

Congratulations @teamsteem!
Your post was mentioned in the Steemit Hit Parade in the following categories:

• Comments - Ranked 2 with 147 comments
• Pending payout - Ranked 1 with $ 739,04

Indeed. It is the sum of all Steem that influence the distribution. This is a lot of money at play.

But it is entirely relevant. In fact you don't address a glaring flaw of superlinear regarding self votes: higher powered self votes from large stakeholders.

Regarding steemit inc rebuttal, what exactly are you looking for? You already got your answers that the non linearity happens in a different manner. So why the narrow focus on n vs n^>1?

I'll spill out a separate comment about different post references as I gather them from steemitblog, as I've been finding some context for the linear change surrounding HF19.

Edit: Ah. Now I see what I'm missing. Only 1 super power self voter. Edited my other thread as well.

ok

yes

Is this your main argument:

"In order to realign incentives and discourage individuals from simply voting for themselves, money must be distributed in a nonlinear manner."

?
If yes, I have to disappoint you, this is not an argument. It has the form of an argument. To get a), we must have b).
The issue is, it is simply a statement. Out of the statement is nowhere to be seen why out of b) we should get a). The content doesn't deliver that. The content of a) is not necessarily connected to b).
Out of b) 'money [...] distributed in a nonlinear manner' does not necessarily follow
a) 'realign[s] incentives and discourage[s] individuals from simply voting for themselves.'

You would have to show why these two are related.

Also helpful for average users would be

• explain linear, non-linear - here non-linear higher n^1, e.g. n^1,3 and n^2 also separately explained - in this context
• make examples, so everyone can concretely understand.

As I understand it, linear means, 1 vote has the effect of its voting power (vote1 1,20$+vote2 0,50$+ vote3 0,20$is 2,00$ payout)
non-linear higher than 1 would mean that the next additional vote is multiplied with the factor (e.g. if n^1,3 then vote 1 1,20$+ vote2 1,3x050=0,65$ + vote3 1,3x1,3x0,20=0,34$is 2,19$ payout).

Or in other words: The more votes cumulate on a post, the higher the payout by some factor (not simply by the power of the votes itself).
As this last sentence I have understood this idea.

Why could this be a bad idea? "refutation" "rebuttal"

Get in the minds of the ones who still wish only to self-serve. Such whales will simply open up lots and lots of accounts and thus increase the number of votes.
Negative:

• Persons who are capable and willing to build bots (large number of accounts connected) have the advantage
• This consumes a lot more RC resources for the blockchain because everyone of these accounts will additionally stress the blockchain.

positive:
None, everything remains the same (self-serving people still self-serve).

This is the same nonsense articulated in 50/50 posts which go on and on about self-votes. Self-votes won't decrease with 50/50 (this is still the most profitable obviously with 50+x vs. max. 50) and without self-voting it will also not vanish because you can achieve the same via second accounts aka voting circles.

Thus
a) no refutation was needed because it wasn't even an argument (if the quoted text is indeed the argument)
b) still refutation via a comparison to now delivered.

Ok, answering my own question:

Found a table that cited the effects on the weights here. This table was initially surprising to me, but actually it's missing the higher tiers that control pretty much the entire rewards pool (though I'm not even sure what the distribution looked like back then). But at least now I see the point people were trying to make: actually makes it so pretty much only one person can self-vote (the fellow at the very top).

So it appears that there is something I missed in terms of discussing power and self-voting, being highly dependent on the distribution, but still, it is wholly dependent on who on the top is on top exercising their high SP votes, and that would still be of concern to me.

But it boils down to the following: The real reason people are claiming self-voting power is reduced is because the total number of people that can self vote effectively is reduced to just the biggest whales (top 10 lol....). But this is still pretty concerning to me. Here's what it sounds like to me:

Before: Nobody can self vote, look at that. (But there's like a handful of posts getting all the rewards, what the heck?)
After: Oh look, we have more even distribution, but there are more self-voters.

The diversity of content being rewarded has increased, has it not? Is it, or is it not an improvement over the old system? Self-voters is a problem, but concentration is a large problem too, and I now see why superlinear does not work when the existing distribution of wealth is how it is.

I think I just summarized the arguments on both sides. Pick your poison, I guess. If you ask me, I prefer linear.

Very interesting!

Nice..

Linear rewards are the styling gel that holds us togeather.

Hahaha!

Aw thanks Axey! I do share this feeling that this dialogue was much warranted.

i am satisfy and its awosm

Hello I'm Paula I'm from Peru I'm 19 years old and I found this page that I love the people that follow me I'll be following https://steemit.com/@paulavasquez

Hello I'm Paula I'm from Peru I'm 19 years old and I found this page that I love the people that follow me I'll be following https://steemit.com/@paulavasquez

Improving steemit is all that matters in my opinion. In every endeavor, there is always the choice between listening to your community and using the intelligent feedback for improving your productions OR going against the community. As it is the case with so many things, people need to learn to not take themselves too seriously but put the project in the foreground instead. That's when real progress is made.

If yes, I have to disappoint you, this is not an argument. It has the form of an argument.

The rest of the argument is in the whitepaper. I even stated it.

The whitepaper's full argument is linked below.

I thought about explaining linear reward vs superlinear but the post was first intended to those who already knew the situation or were vested enough to learn about it themselves as I had provided the sourced material.

non-linear higher than 1 would mean that the next additional vote is multiplied with the factor (e.g. if n^1,3 then vote 1 1,20$+ vote2 1,3x050=0,65$ + vote3 1,3x1,3x0,20=0,34$is 2,19$ payout).

You got that wrong. Did you read the full argument from the whitepaper?

It's all rshares^1,3. All rshares a post received added together then ^1,3 not each of them individually ^1,3.

Thank you for your inputs.

I suppose you consider bidbot delegation schemes to be the same than self-voting

Somewhat.

however I don't see how they would go away today if we re-changed

I think they would, as the bigger player would have incentives to downvote the posts with bid-bot votes and put an end to the practice. That's how I see it. It doesn't mean that's how it would play out. It's a very big unknown.

No of course I did not again read 44 pages of whitepaper.

This is what I asked of you: Explain more detailedly.
Adding

This mirrors the value of network effect which grows with ​​​the number of participants [...]

to the two sentences would have already helped.
and saying that the paragraph "Voting on Distribution of Currency" is the one that is important to you.

You got that wrong.

I was well aware of that I very much could be wrong, only made an example. An example of an example even.
So thanks for the correction. Still, next time, a short example calculation would help (in the article).

Interesting that you didn't answer the (main) points:

Or in other words: The more votes cumulate on a post, the higher the payout by some factor (not simply by the power of the votes itself).

Why could this be a bad idea? "refutation" "rebuttal"

Get in the minds of the ones who still wish only to self-serve. Such whales will simply open up lots and lots of accounts and thus increase the number of votes.
Negative:

Persons who are capable and willing to build bots (large number of accounts connected) have the advantage.
This consumes a lot more RC resources for the blockchain because every one of these accounts will additionally stress the blockchain.

But after all: You read it. So thanks for reading!

The more votes cumulate on a post the higher the payout by some factor

That's incorrect. It's not the number of votes. It's the number of rshares.

Such whales will simply open up lots and lots of accounts and thus increase the number of votes.

That's irrelevant. It's not the number of votes. Again, it's the number of rshares. Rshares are influenced by voting power and Steem Power.

Good.
Thanks!

That clarifies it.

Uremises you’re working from appear different from most. Contrary to the post, reality is that rewards are still non linear today via dust, human appreciation for contributions, and curation.

Beyond that, it’s my philosophy that it’s important to stay open open-mindedd aptable while building a currency and that is why I described Steem as an Experiment in the Whitepaper.

This letter actually addressed some issues but too lengthy

Downvoted in response to excessive reward

i think the assumption is that people will converge into what's valuable... but as the old saying says: beautify is in the eye of the beholder and to apply it to steem...

One man's shitpost is another man's gold..

Thank steem explain about liner reward and non liner reward..

I have a totally different concept from Steemit if we want to have a massive number of new users and a large number of successful bloggers.

1. We need to make a referral system, in this way we get a lot of users and investors.

2. I would reduce the earnings of investors to 65% for personal voting on personal posts.

3. 10% would get a user from voting on other posts.

4. 25% 25% would be divided into 5 levels of depth of 5% on the referral-network marketing system from all earnings on posts and comments.

5. I would put conditions that must be fulfilled on a daily and weekly basis if we want to have a profit of 5 depths.

In this way, we get a great mass of new users-investors and a great quality of posts and activities. The focus on technology is great, but the focus on the network of people is even better because it brings money, the value of Steem and Steemit, and we all benefit from it.

The reward system is ok, this is not a web site for donations, Steemit is a business network and we need to align it with the social masses and I give a proposal that I am very sure to work in the interest of all users.

I would like to see you at SteemFest but I'm not in a position because I have scheduled business days.

If you want, I invite you to see us in Macedonia, Skopje after SteemFest.

asi mismo

When you say "people will converge", you mean when things are superlinear? This isn't going to be true, unless you mean to say "a few top whales will converge". And that's the troubling part for me.

Posted using Partiko Android

I've long come to grips with the fact that trending was never amazing... it was different because of how young the project was.

Look at whaleshares, look at the amount of rewards being given... early adopters are potentially killing it... and its linear!

watch a year from now people over there complaining about the same things they do here.

Crypto currency would be good in every run , long short and medium term I am with you

Spontaneous order yes, democrecy no
Steem and blockchain technology is inspired by freedom and decentralization. In reality, there is still a long way to go because there are groups that want to dominate and have a monopoly on power. I do not see any sense in a vote between 20 witnesses to decide on the life on this platform of hundreds of thousands of people ...

Why not leave the decision to each person?
That each one chooses the option that he wants in his publication, as well as decides if the reward is 50-50, 100% or without reward, it can also be included that decides on the distribution between the curator and the author. So I could choose between for example: 75-25 / 60-40 / 50-50 / 100 curator or 100% author ... this could also give clues about which is the best possible distribution, we will see the reaction of the curator seeing what is the distribution and deciding whether to vote or not.

A way could be devised so that the curators can easily find their favorite option, so if someone likes to vote 100% for the curator, he can easily get it, of course surely there will not be many posts in this option. This could be a great experience to determine how the community thinks, even with this you could make better decisions

upvoted

I am still confused about how to use this steemit

It's still okay to post a lot and self-vote a lot under the proposed changed in economic incentives (not sure if OP agrees to all the items in the proposal). It'd just no longer the most efficient move for rewards most users. There'll be outliers of course, but I'll address that later.

Better not to mix up what's best for every individual and new user on the network with what's best for the platform, Steem. The latter should be as equally as important as the former. There's too much of a huge cost involved in linear atm, and it's not like linear has any shades like how we can define mild, medium, and extremely superlinear. Linear is just linear. It provides a different economical modality compared to superlinear.

Linear gives everyone efficiently priced votes, an immediately exploitable feature for anyone to undercut Steem's economy (attention, marketprice) anytime and without risk of overwhelming objections. It can be observed, experienced, and they even check out economically.

Linear creates a perpetually disarrayed attention economy and a discounted pool of Steem, which actually goes against the best long-term interest of stakeholders. We've also learned that n² is too much so we should go for a softer measure. At least superlinear has different shades, unlike linear.

This is why some of us have proposed somewhere in between linear, n and n². We just need most of the benefits of superlinear at low-cost, which is why some of us have chosen n^1.3 as a ballpark figure. The other two proposal items like 50% curation rewards and a 10% separate downvote pool to plug most of the potential leaks and outliers, but I'll leave everyone to refer to @trafalgar's recent post on it for more info. It's a shame if we were only just supposed to flatten out n² for its extreme effect, but instead of going to n^1.x, we end up with linear (n¹) simply because it's way easier to implement? There's a fundamental difference between linear and superlinear.

Thanks for the post @teamsteem, I wish more would look into the economical significance between linear vs superlinear, and why we should move away from what we have today. After the proposed changes, I know I would no longer heavily upvote my dog, cat, cousins, and friends who are generally not very good content creators, unless they improve and become more competitive over time. At least I know the proposed "new economy" isn't going to be actively discouraging stakeholders from rewarding great contributions.

Let's not get muddled up in our need to reward all of our activities on the network. Rewards and activities are separate. We can still post all day and night and vote ourselves, it's just not immediately the most efficient move for rewards anymore under the proposed changes. Instead, curation will be on the same level, if not better. Maybe I like to post a lot, it doesn't mean that I'd want to vote on my own stuff all the time if the economy doesn't encourage it (not as profitable to do so unless other curators really like my stuff). Curation is where it's at. That's what SP is all about.

That entire statement makes no sense. The returned rewards represent either the same % of the reward pool (if all returned) or a smaller % (if only a portion are returned). There is no way for it to increase. I have no idea what sort of convoluted reasoning has led you to conclude this.

I've cut corners while explaining my point.

Let's say someone's flag or vote was first worth an infinitesimal part of the reward pool well after the most extreme case imaginable where every single vote is counteracted, well that infinitesimal vote would now control 100% of the pool.

The incentives to defect become greater as more flags are given because flagers become "fewer" or spent and the potential rewards greater.

It's a very convoluted way to make my point and I'm not sure how sound my explanation of it is but hopefully, it's clear enough.

It's good that you are calling me on my half-baked explanation that I had given. I knew when I wrote my answer it wasn't really clear at best and possibly didn't mean much at worst.

By giving every steem user the ability to mute the EFFECT of votes by allowing them to mute VOTERS

This addresses this issue of visibility, and any UI can experiment with different visibility systems right now. It doesn't address the issue of reward distribution. The latter is a Steem blockchain function and can't be changed by UIs.

though I'm not even sure what the distribution looked like back then

Not that different in broad terms.

actually makes it so pretty much only one person can self-vote (the fellow at the very top).

Not really. This is a simplistic analysis that only considers individual self-votes. People are creative in coming up with games, businesses, services, explicit or implicit vote trading agreements (two or more semi-whales agree to each vote for their other's posts, etc.), vote trails with profit sharing, etc. in order to assemble up the necessary rewards to exploit superlinear. It was already happening during the n^2 era and would certainly increase over time.

Pretty much the only thing that superlinear is good for is reducing the absolute number of content items with payout so it is easier to find the undeserving and downvote them. (But, as I've noted elsewhere, this is useless if downvotes are too expensive.) It comes with a heavy cost in terms of making literal self-voting more profitable for those at the top and exploitative team voting schemes more profitable for the rest. Interestingly, the 'mild' superlinear that some propose, while mitigating the degree of rewards monopolized by the very top (or by large schemes), would at the same time increase the number of stakeholders for whom literal self-voting is more profitable (and similarly reduce the necessary scale of team voting to achieve profitability). No free lunch here.

Did anybody bother to read this part of the whitepaper?

Did you?

"large bounties for good content"

The white paper seems to claim that it does reward quality content.

I wish more would look into the economical significance between linear vs superlinear, and why we should move away from what we have today.

I fully agree. I wish more people would have joined the discussion.

You're right. My statement doesn't necessarily apply 100% of the time.

well that infinitesimal vote would now control 100% of the pool

Aside from the fact that this situation is contrived and would never happen....you haven't demonstrated anything here. It is just as easy to downvote that vote as all the others, and there is no reason to believe that after all the other votes are counteracted this one wouldn't be too.

You could make a similar argument for non-linear. As votes become more concentrated there is no incentive to vote for anything but the single highest-paid post (even if it is complete and utter garbage/abuse/etc.). Everything else will pay nothing making the vote worthless! It becomes a tyranny of vote-for-the-biggest-or-your-vote-is-worthless.

These extreme cases are not helpful.

I can't figure out when it would ever apply, at first thought. In a 100% curation system, the author gets nothing. So you could vote on any content you wanted and you would get the same reward, completely independent of whether it was your content or someone else's.

In such a system, there wouldn't even be additional direct rewards to be gained by making people think your content was "good" by upvoting it yourself, since if they did then vote for it, you wouldn't get any reward from their vote.

About the only think I could come up with is some indirect benefit of increased fame, but it's questionable how much "positive fame" you would get unless your content was actually good.

You're right it wouldn't make any difference for who people vote so my statement was only partially correct. 100% to curation is an extreme that doesn't make any sense. It was part of what I was pointing at. Again, I appreciate your opinion and I wish more top witnesses would have joined.

It's definitely an extreme case, and not one to explore right now, IMO, but it has been proposed before as an alternative to the current system and it "could" make sense.

In such a system, the blockchain pays rewards to good curators (i.e. investors) and authors only benefit indirectly (via recognition, advertising, etc).

It's not as crazy as it might sound at first: plenty of people write all the time now without expecting direct monetary rewards from what they write.

All that aside, I'm definitely not in favor of trying something like that on Steem.

Oh yeah, you seem new... remembering the eye and all...

best comment in this whole thread

there is no downvoting on youtube, there is only like and dislike, and report - here on Steemit any whale or deepstate sponsored individual can ruin someone's rep by big downvotes, seen it when @berniesanders did it to me

The first post I totally agree with @berniesanders. Am I going soft?

LOL, so true, @timcliff has even removed your way of seeing how many bots, eurm viewers visited your post.

Yes, I appreciate that my suggestion is a UI feature, however, it does address reward distribution by directly empowering all users to affect reward distribution by disincentivising the use of bidbots in a way that everyone can decide to participate in or not participate in. If this approach gained wide adoption, it is easy to imagine that bidbots would no longer be attractive.

Thanks for the story

Very amazing news....

Thanks, this makes a lot of sense. One thing I would venture a guess to, and do correct me if I'm wrong, is that if a group of people pooled SP into one account and had a comfortable SP lead, they could actually self vote and even if everyone downvoted it it wouldn't matter because their influence is that much more than everyone else put together? It's why I mention that distribution is important. The dynamics you mention seem like the case when multiple parties have roughly similar stake at the top?

@heimindanger is bigot trash who refers to people as "fag". Look at his comment history and you'll see just what a piece of shit he truly is!!

This is only ONE example, there are more in his comments.

uno gana dinero por comentar?

@ned delegates to @dtube

@dtube is run by @heimindanger

@heimindanger is a bigot who routinely refers to people as "fag" in a derogatory manner.

Does @ned support bigotry?

@ned delegates to @dtube

@dtube is run by @heimindanger

@heimindanger is a bigot who routinely refers to people as "fag" in a derogatory manner.

Does @ned support bigotry?

you nicely stated this I've rehashed the original whitepaper's argument against linear rewards of which I haven't seen any valid rebuttal. I've asked 2 questions from which I hope a clearer picture can emerge to the benefit of everyone.

Steem's stakes are huge for all of us. It would have been a lot less risks for me to accept the current status quo but I needed to stand up for what I'm convinced of and for which I haven't seen any valid rebuttal.

I'm failing to see how the system can work without some sort of superlinear. (in reward to post reward as opposed to curation reward). Now, Steem is far from simple system and it's hard to foresee all possibilities.

Also, I didn't realize 100% curation shouldn't be ruled out outright so thanks for enlarging my horizons in that regard.

Under superlinear, the rewards go disproportionally toward the consensus in the saw way, the flags are disproportionally powerful when cast against the consensus.

Under linear rewards, everyone has, proportionally to their stake, the same incentive to defect (self-vote) as everyone else (except for curation reward), while under superlinear, the biggest shareholders have a disproportional incentive to defect but if too many do, they collapse their own network and Steem net worth. Thus there is an incentive for them to police each other. It is mathematically possible for them to effectively police each other unlike under linear reward.

Under linear everyone has the same incentive to defect and thus no incentive to flag. Expecting more flags to be given when there are no incentives for flags goes against logic.

There is superlinearity in curation rewards now, it's just not based on stake. Essentially, the superlinearity is based off being the first to spot good content before others find it and vote on it. The early voters get more than the later voters. The idea is that this will encourage a curator to find the content that other people will vote on.

But this is often misunderstood right now: many voters think they get more for voting for a post that already has a lot of votes on it, when such votes actually get much less of the overall curation reward.

Most importantly, under 25% rewards split among all curators versus 75% going to the one author, this superlinearity is pretty much moot because the rewards are just so small relative to author rewards that the economics are totally skewed to self-voting.

The most important thing to do now is to change this percentage to allow for meaningful curation rewards. Then we can consider tinkering without how those curation rewards are apportioned after they become numbers that matter.

Can I get a reason to buy an smt?

Those might be very good idea but they might turn out to be very difficult to implement. They are worth exploring.

I already have other projects after Steem Fest or I would have seriously considered it. Macedonia looks like a cool place!

But even under 50% curation or even 75% curation wouldn't the big whale simply look to vote for themselves? Wouldn't exclusive self upvote be the surest strategy for best ROI for most of the large whales?

Under 50% (and especially under 75%) curation, it's definitely not the biggest incentive, even for a large whale, as long as other large whales also exist (or just a lot of other voters whose combined stake exceeds that of the whale). In such cases, the whale can make more by voting early on a popular post, versus voting for his own post.

Here's a simple hypothetical example at 50%, assuming the whale owns a whopping 1/10 of total voting stake (no current whales have this much stake, so it's an extreme case, but I wanted to demonstrate this holds true even for very large whales, it's even more true for those with less stake):

• whale votes at full strenght for his own post, post gets valued at $100. Whale takes away the total reward of$100.

OR ALTERNATIVELY

• whale votes early at full strength on someone else's post, this post is more popular, so all available voting stake votes for it. Reward is 10 times as great because all voters voted on it, so under linear rewards for post value = $100 * 10 =$1000 total reward. The author gets 50% (i.e. $500). The curators split$500, but the early voters gets a much larger percentage of this reward. If curation rewards were linear, the whale would only get $500*1/10 =$50. But by being an early voter, he gets substantially more. I don't know the exact math, but it's certainly more than $100 of the$500.

And how the hell do smt's given away to 'reward creators' convince me to let go of my steem, let alone btc?

I still haven't seen any use cases, outside experimental reward curves, that make me think I need to buy me some sweet steemapp coin.

Under the current curator distribution system, this is how your example plays out @blocktrades

Chart #1 shows under the current 25/75 distribution and chart #2 displays what it would be if it was 50/50 distribution.

Highlighted in light blue is the curation reward payout of the first voter (a.k.a. The Whale with a $100 vote value).

As you can see from chart #1 (the current system) the whale makes a curation reward of ~79 STEEM. Thus, it’s about 29% less than a 100% self-vote.

In chart #2 you can see that the whale would make ~158 STEEM in curation rewards - 2x as much as the 25/75 split.. makes sense, right?

In this theoretical example (under a 50/50 split) the whale would make 58% more by curating content that will later be upvoted by a significant amount of vests (a.k.a. a large collective or even a single whale with a significant amount of STEEM POWER) than through 100% self-votes.

Now, you’ve given us an example of 1 large whale, which does make the calculations simpler and I think helps to give everyone some perspective on how significant a change like this would be.

What most people don’t understand however, is that if this high level of incentivization was in place, then it is far more likely that people will continually be “on the hunt” for the best content that will rise to the top after they vote on it - which was the original intention of the system that we have now. I especially consider this to be a positive direction if real manual curation teams (like Acidyo’s initiatives) start popping up. But that’s all just my own speculation. I can envision a scenario where whales decide that they are better off delegating to effective curation teams rather than self-voting or even delegating to bid bots.

Thus under a 50/50 split, everyone would have a higher incentive to vote on an unknown post before it becomes known - whether your vote was $0.10 or$100...

This makes the whole debate over curation rewards very valid in my mind, and I’m leaning towards a 50/50 split although I think extensive testing and thought experiments ought to be done before we uppend the current system.

Good news..

Good news

Thanks for filling in the details with hard data!

Always a pleasure to help where I can! 😊

Thanks. I just find it really sucks that we can't get a single response of why this has happened from anyone at Steemit. Pretty lame.

TU AVAIS TOTALLEMENT RAISON MON AMI!

You were right to post your question directly here instead of going about it privately, as just look at the number of votes (909 as of now, 273 comments + $722.59 for this post alone!) which speaks volumes. I've never seen a post with so many responses since I've been on this platform.

We can see that Steemit has managed to politicize the issue rather than address it in a way that was inclusive and beneficial to the community. This is further exacerbated by the manner in which the CEO of Steemit @ned lost his ability to reason logically in response to your, very reasonable, tactful, and most polite, request.

He does stopped the conversation - for all to see - in the thread between you and him. Pretty lame.

En tout cas, je te supporte jusqu'a la fin.

A+

One would think.

Thanks for the suggestion. Can you point me to a resource that would explain how to do this? And are there some drawbacks of doing this? (such as being tracked by unwanted parties)

First you have to believe there will be SMT's.

If they are gonna save us shouldnt it be easy to point to reasons to buy one?

Bernie, I think you are awesome.

See me:
https://steemit.com/blog/@kittykat/i-am-kittykat-just-a-girl-learning-what-this-is-all-about

Let's go on a date

Yes, it is, welcome like a friend and for a business project.

Hello. @CoolPeopleIFB here

Just reading through this chain to understand. I'm at the bottom of this todem pole as a plankton. Successful in the outside world (https://twitter.com/Gain_TweetsIFB ) but a nobody here. Bloggers Uniting to try to help end poverty. My followers have joined too (#SteemDrive @steem.drive).

You all must realize that all newbies that come in from the outside will automatically UPVOTE themselves as they see it as a RETWEET (since they can't Resteem themselves). Thinking it will RESUBMIT their post to some heavenly place that will help build up their traffic somewhere on here. I was one of them. Gosh, my first 100 posts were that way.

And to add insult to injury, I work with @SteemPress (a plugin for Steem Wordpress users, which has the default set this way).

I of course, I have changed the settings since learning of this. hopefully now, my Content Creation on Steem It will get recognized.

Lastly, this Topic is off Category BUT @ned: Why wouldn't Steemians get credit for new signups wanting to follow us on SteemIt? (We've been promoting the Hell out of it after seeing an incentive posted on Steem community to do so).

Look forward to your reciprocation. Thanks for sharing!

Bloggers of Cool Things. #Movies, #Music #Hobbies, #Food, #Fashion, #Entertainment, #SocialMediaInfluencer #GainRiot #CCBoost #BadAssGains #SteemIt #CoolPeopleIFB #SteemDrive #1First #1Family #MagicCircle

JOIN: https://twitter.com/Cool_PeopleIFB

PS: This is getting annoying. I can only post once a day & comment twice.

#RPCError: plugin exception:Account: coolpeopleifb has 141529796 RC, needs 3531162396 RC. Please wait to transact, or power up STEEM.rethrow

Al parecer si, jajajaj por fin un español

You are wrong. Investing in human Trust and Relationships gives the best ROI. A person doing self-upvotes is never going to get the same Leverage and Return as the person investing into other humans. You can scale stuff when you invest in other humans. As you get access to more energy. You can not scale it by investing all into yourself. Coca-Cola spends 3 billion dollars per year in advertising. That is leverage. Same as best ROI leverage always will be invest in people with potential for growth.

This utopian idea that we will 1 day have a bunch of happy curators in mass amounts is a bit funny to hear XD It will never happen. So 50/50 is only something that would benefit 20-30 early high stake accounts. It would leech off true content creators.

People automate the curation process more and more. There is no middle class of curators and never will be. At least not the next couple of years. 5 years then yes. Since stake share out was not done in a good way. "The curators" = Speaking about 10 early high Stake accounts. The content creators are plentiful! And they are growing for every day that goes!

When you are speaking about "the curators" remember that they currently are just a mega small group. And if you would make it 50/50 you would punish the growing amount of true content creators. The main source of curation at the moment is coming from private high Stake people or misterdelegation. That will say 50/50 would not change a single thing to make content creators getting more leverage. It would just increase the gap between the rich and poor. Ned has even talked about this.

Actually, I think you’re mistaken.

As I mentioned in my comment, these calculations scale to any size account. In fact, when you have a smaller upvote value (say, $0.10) it is easier to earn a greater multiplier on your curation reward by voting on a post before a whale votes.

What I mean by this is the following: a small curator casting a vote - even if it’s as little as $0.01 - would earn 2x, 3x or even 8x their upvote value if they upvote a piece of content before a whale.

There are far more content curators than content creators and increasing the incentive for people to upvote unknown posts would help both the smaller content curators as well as the smaller content creators.

The issue we have is with that of behavior patterns - right now, the incentive to self-vote is much higher than to upvote a high quality piece of content. As you can see in my original comment and chart #1.

I also mentioned that extensive testing is needed before any change should ever be made. However, I’ve spent a lot of time calculating curation rewards and trust me - this would help small curators even more so than “whale” curators. Which means that everyone has a greater incentive not to self-vote and thus, the proper intention of good content being discovered and rising to the top could possibly be restored - again, extensive testing required!!!

Good point, im not a supporter of lines either.

"There are far more content curators than content creators and increasing the incentive for people to upvote unknown posts would help both the smaller content curators as well as the smaller content creators."

This is only true for smaller curation happenings. But they are not the main accounts empowering people. Today I got a 7777 SP delegation from nathanmars. He is on team content creators. He is putting stake behind what he does.

This is what will make this ecosystem grow. Not selfish 50% curation systems. There are very few high curation sources that matters. There are more content creators that matters. As they have limitless amount of new content. This is what draws in new humans in the system.

"The issue we have is with that of behavior patterns - right now, the incentive to self-vote is much higher than to upvote a high quality piece of content. As you can see in my original comment and chart #1."

This is not true at all. The highest ROI is to invest in Trust and Relationships. Yes it would help small curators in the short term. But it would not empower content creators in the long run. Especially if they want to have massive future influence. Since they have no leverage. This can already be seen in Socialist countries with 50% tax. It doesn't give incentive for anyone to create amazing content. It would encourage fast content with low effort.

Content creators are the main authority, next comes Stake holders and then comes advertisers. If you value content creators at the top, curators second and advertisers third then a network can grow. But if you value curators above content then you mess up the whole ecosystem.

People that currently isn't in thriving mode will never thrive magically with a change. Since lazy stay lazy. @lordbutterfly has pointed out in excellent posts why 50/50 will not work.

It will only work if you think that small curators are the future of a content network. But they are not producing new stuff.

From what i looked at its pretty clear imo that vote selling for your hypothetical whale is still a more lucrative deal then curation after vote selling markets adjust to increase in curation. And they will.
After the passive investors move away from bots and into vote selling you will have a huge supply of votes on MB and SS.
Once the balance is struck, you just made it much cheaper in liquid STEEM/SBD for the vote buyers to get on top of trending. The vote value you had to pay 400 SBD to get on top of trending, now you will be paying around 250SBD for.

50/50 changes absolutely nothing and potentially makes it even worse. These calculations you made seem to be right, but they are just one side of the coin. No one seems to even want to look what side effects this change will have.

If vote selling is still the profit maximizing option then there is absolutely no way that passive bot investors or semi active whales, after they realize it, wont move to vote selling...
If they are doing "nothing" now and this change happens, they will continue to look to do nothing and earn as much as they can.
Vote selling and getting "smaller amounts of liquid assets and more curation" is still superior to "just curation".

This proposal slightly cuts the passive income of bot delegators (now vote sellers) since more liquid gains is better then more SP gains, but remaining passive is still the most lucrative deal.
Also, now you did a great service to current vote buyers.

You didnt change the content placement problem, you made it worse since "going trending" is cheaper now, smaller account behavior wont change much since they earn almost nothing from curation, and you moved the earnings from the non-boting creators to whale curators.
Is this a smart thing to do when retention is a big deal in a bear market?

Im going to ping @blocktrades since he upvoted me a few times to see if any of what i wrote makes sense to him.

Again, I'm just playing devil's advocate here. I have taken no sides in the debate of what should be implemented and changed on the blockchain.

Let me continue that role by saying this: nathanmars is doing incredible work and there are a few others like him who are empowering fellow creators like yourself, however: that is not a scalable model.

What you're hoping for is a perfect world where people who have abundance are willing to share that abundance with others. I wish it were otherwise, but it simply is not human nature to act in accordance to those principles.

The ecosystem will not grow (in my opinion) to the scale that we all want to see it grow to through actions like those. Yes, they are highly beneficial on the micro level and I hope that more people stand up and do similar initiatives, but it is simply to big of an ask to get people on board with those kinds of activities.

Thus, you run yourself back to the initial idea of Steem and upvoting --> the idea behind the Steem ecosystem and the rewards pool and what not was all designed for people to spread their upvotes to others to both reward themselves (through curation) as well as to reward their fellow humans.

Believe me - if you can incentivize people to reward themselves AND reward fellow creators, then my friend, you are in business!

You don't have to believe me though, you can see how this all played out on the Steem blockchain in its current state: are the majority of people self-voting and delegating to bots or are they acting against their own interests and delegating SP at no profitability to creators such as yourself? The answer is obvious, I'm afraid.

Again, I don't know if setting a 50/50 split would solve these issues and I actually believe that it wouldn't - only that it is a worthwhile pursuit to at least consider the possibilities and run tests and experiments.

Now, I'll give you my person position --> I believe that SMTs will fragment the Steem blockchain into a bunch of smaller communities which will serve to solve the issues of incentivizing people to both earn the maximum reward for themselves while simultaneously rewarding their fellow creators. I just wrote a post on this exact idea, if you want to give it a read.

Again, I'm totally with you and I wish the world were as we hoped it would be - everyone helps each other in a completely selfless way and we all rise to the top together, but we unfortunately do not have such a perfect world.

That's why I believe these smaller communities will form with their own economic models that will far exceed anything like what we see now happening on the blockchain ---> that is how we scale the unscalable: by bringing the macro back down to the micro level!!!

I'm not sure why it's "funny to hear" that we could have a bunch of happy curators: it was one of the key goals of the original design of Steem. And it's certainly a viable premise: people like to vote for things they like, even without an economic incentive.

However, I get the strong feeling that you think this is just a move by whales to get rich off curation rewards. To me, that's mostly a laughable notion as well.

I actually think "good" content creators will get rewarded more under 50/50 rewards, for reasons I've expressed throughout comments here and elsewhere.

100% @blocktrades. I’ve said multiple times that I’m just playing devils advocate, but I tend to lean towards a greater split going to curators because it will incentivize more outward voting.

I think a lot of people are confused and believe that you need a huge stake to earn high curation rewards... it’s actually the opposite that is true: when you have a smaller stake, it’s actually easier to earn a higher “multiple” on your curation reward when you vote before others on a post.

For example, under the current structure if you vote first with $0.10 on a post and then$1.50 worth of votes come in after yours, then your curation reward is $0.10 (equivalent to a self vote)...

However, let’s say a whale with a $100 vote does the same thing and is first on a post: it would take$1500 worth of votes after their $100 to make their vote equivalent to a 100% self vote.

And that’s under the current structure. If curation rewards were to tilt more in favor of curators (or at least, 50/50), then it would become significantly easier for a curator to earn more by curating new and high quality posts that people actually like - regardless of how big your stake is (and actually as I demonstrated, it favors those with a smaller stake).

The original goal of the entire Steem system is to reward outward behavior and in exchange, know that if you produce great content others will also be participating in such outward voting habits and upvote your content as much or likely even more than you upvote their content because it is in everyone’s best economic interest to curate good content.

Obviously, the system isn’t working as intended. I’m not sure if increase curation rewards would solve all the issues, but it could be worth a try. Additionally, I think SMTs are going to change the “tribalism” of Steem and make scalable what is currently unscalable (I.e. better economic incentives for good behavior, better disincentives for bad behavior, content discovery, etc).

the biggest shareholders have a disproportional incentive to defect but if too many do, they collapse their own network and Steem net worth. Thus there is an incentive for them to police each other

This part is totally bogus. There is no body of 'biggest shareholders' and most if not all generally believe they can gain personal advantage and not worry about the whole. That is human nature and demonstrated time and time again including on Steem.

Possibly if you had a much higher actual stake concentration of one or a few truly dominant stakeholders AND it were stable AND there weren't ways to cheat the cartel and get away with it (all false) then it might be valid. But in reality it isn't even that. We have whales with maybe a few percent of stake at most which are far to small. Even whales for practical purposes just end up being regular users most of the time, albeit with bigger votes.

There is no meaningful difference in incentives to downvote when someone has 1% stake holding vs. 0.00001% stake. In either case it is done almost entirely to express an opinion with limited to negligible direct economic incentive or impact. Both may also feel some sort desire to do good for the platform, but it is primarily emotional and not economic, in both cases.

Continuing to quote the white paper on this is entirely boring because experience shows otherwise. When theory conflicts with data revise the theory.

The only benefit I've ever been convinced of from superlinear is reducing dust farming, which to be fair is not nothing, particularly given the lack of any robust incentive for any individual to care about or take action against abuse (see above). The other arguments don't hold up.

Also, the 'defect' terminology really doesn't make sense here. There is no clearly defined cooperation criteria. A system like this is too large and complex and too subject to differing opinions and attitudes over what constitutes mutually beneficial cooperation (as well as the nature and magnitude of any benefits to be achieved therefrom) for cooperate-vs-defect to be a useful label IMO. If people can't even agree on what it means to cooperate, they can't decide whether to cooperate or defect. The entire model is inapplicable.

Bidbots do not primarily exist for visibility, that's a secondary consideration, and arguably could be described as an excuse. Even if they granted no visibility whatsoever they would still exist and be used because they would have a small positive ROI (as they occasionally do already). Granted this might reduce their perceived legitimacy (assuming they have some?) and that could be a positive, but this is all very indirect.

Yes obviously if enough people pool their stake it could be more than all of the rest disagreed both in theory (at 50%+) and in practice (at some much lower threshold).

Whether it is multiple parties are not doesn't matter that much when people can come up with ways to pool, which they can.

In the beginning it was profitable to use bid bots just to increase rewards, but now it is much harder to do that. If people want to sell their votes to each other, that's their business and I don't see that there's anything I or anyone else can do to stop that. The issue for me here is whether or not bid bots prevent true 'proof of brain' from functioning and it is clear to me that they do.

Without something approaching 'proof of brain' - which was an underpinning of the entire Steem network from the beginning, we are left with much less attraction to the eco-system and it's technology for many people.

The only reason I would ever use a bid bot is to increase the reach of my posts and I don't even bother to do that now since I rarely meet anyone who even looks at the trending posts page any more because of the bots. I remember that before the bots, it was quite possible to see some of the best posts on the network in the trending pages, as was intended. Now that just doesn't happen.

They prevent proof of brain from functioning because people sell their votes. When votes are made on the basis of generating a reward vs. expressing an opinion it is not possible for their to be proof of brain. Proof-of-brain = express an opinion.

My point there was that privately selling votes cannot be stopped, but we can take action to empower users to stop known accounts that specifically only sell votes from having any effect on our experience. I believe that the 'Steeve' UI for Steem does this already.

Bid bots make it practical to habitually buy votes, then use the profits to buy more votes - this means that those involved in this 'arms race' will always be faced with the thought that if they stop then they will lose their 'position'. They will have a way of dominating as long as they continue - the pattern is really quite similar to addiction except that it's everyone else who suffers more than the addicted person!

By implementing the voter muting feature it becomes possible for all of us to identify those accounts that violate our own limits in terms of their voting activity - whether it be because we think they sell votes or for other reasons. We can then be empowered to elect to remove them from our experience.

This ultimately might be called 'proof of the will and brain' :)

I stand behind the original whitepaper's argument. We disagree. My commentary made on my original post has inexactitudes and I plan on possibly strike them through.

dust farming

Dust farming is vote farming. I don't see why some votes should be left out.

If every voter defects by voting for themselves then no currency will end up distributed and the currency as a whole will fail to gain network effect.

This is also true for superlinear rewards but under superlinear rewards, consensus influences the distribution of rewards and flags and thus every vote and flag influence one another which isn't so under linear rewards.

Both may also feel some sort desire to do good for the platform, but it is primarily emotional and not economic, in both cases.

In the long run, if the platform, Steem price doesn't perform well then the biggest holders lose more from gaming the system then the price drop.

Getting paid for 0 work is the only detrimental "work" being done. Any work however controversial has value. To defect is to create 0 work i.e. exploit a loophole if one exists and abuse it as long as possible at the detriment of the whole.

As the price increase, the incentive to defect (i.e. self-upvote) grows and flags don't solve this as the flags simply return the reward to the reward pool, making it bigger proportionally to the number of people remaining eligible for it.

As a whole, the smaller the voters, the easier for them to defect without being caught.

I'm still very much enjoying this conversation as I think it's very much important and it really seems like you care even though we might disagree in the end.

My point there was that privately selling votes cannot be stopped

This is true however with downvotes it can be made unattractive to both buy (because return on the vote will be poor) or and sell (because selling prices will be poor) votes in a content-agnostic manner.

Your voter muting idea doesn't help the proof-of-brain function really. It might help make your personal view more useful. I don't disagree it is a fine feature, just not one that really helps address Steem's core problems.

I stand behind the original whitepaper's argument

Then you are either a fool or irrational. To continue to stand by a theory when observed data don't agree is not the basis for any conversation I care to have.

At a minimum it needs: a) a reasoned explanation for the discrepancies, and b) additional qualifications and refinement to agree with new observations.

Come up with a theory that is predictive and also explains observed behavior. I will be happy to discuss it. The refuted white paper theories not so much.

In the long run, if the platform, Steem price doesn't perform well then the biggest holders lose more from gaming the system then the price drop

Everyone does. There is no special role for 'the biggest holders' here (even if that term were defined, which it isn't).

Dust farming is vote farming.

Let me clarify that. Superlinear reduces the quantity of content that people need to consider downvoting. That's beneficial as a labor saving device.

I agree that downvotes have a direct effect, but they have negatives too:

1. They require constant use by the community to manually apply them - which takes up people's valuable time and causes annoyance.
2. They can inspire discord and conflicts/wars between people that does not cultivate a pleasant environment and welcoming social space.
3. Giving people 'free' downvotes gives malicious users an extra tool that they can use which will also further empower those with the most SP, while potentially directly negatively effecting others with less who cannot respond. I see bad outcomes from this! lol

To continue to stand by a theory when observed data don't agree is not the basis for any conversation I care to have.

Provide a formal disproval of what is in the whitepaper. We disagree on the data but you haven't provided any holistic data.

Everyone does.

Someone losing millions of dollars from Steem price drop does lose more than someone who loses only a couple of dollars. They lose the same proportion but that's not what I was arguing.

The refuted white paper theories not so much.

I stand by those who say the whitepaper theory hasn't been properly refuted. I hope you can respect that. This is my honest conclusion from my limited human mind.

Provide a formal disproval of what is in the whitepaper. We disagree on the data but you haven't provided any holistic data

We had a year of experience with n^2. The theory that the largest stakeholders would police each other was shown to be false. People were shown to be more concerned with seeing to their own rewards than spending valuable vote power downvoting others.

To complement that observation with theory, the economics of being more concerned about the value of their steem investment that personal gains don't hold up. For any stakeholder (at least <50%) the personal reward is greater than the share that hurts the value of that stakeholders share of steem's total value. The rest of the cost is borne by others. A system with these tragedy-of-the-commons properties is badly designed and needs refinement or replacement.

Someone losing millions of dollars from Steem price drop does lose more than someone who loses only a couple of dollars

The "large" numbers are irrelevant and are being thrown out for scare value. A large stakeholder may care less about millions of dollars than a small stakeholder may care about couple of dollars. You can't generalize. Furthermore the incentives to self-reward scale accordingly or in the case of superlinear, more than accordingly. The one at risk of losing millions can gain thousands or more per vote. The one at risk of losing two dollars can gain either proportionately or less. There is no sounds argument here that supports large stakeholders being 'good shepherds". None. If you think there is, please make it, step to step, and showing specific incentives (in at last a qualitative sense) without resorting to scare numbers.

You are right on all counts but I see no other method where expressing an opinion has a chance to compete with voting for return or more precisely to anchor things so that voting for return is somehow connected with opinons. With all their downsides, downvotes are still the only viable option.

The "large" numbers are irrelevant and are being thrown out for scare value. A large stakeholder may care less about millions of dollars than a small stakeholder may care about couple of dollars.

Most people care about their investment. Even Warren Buffet cares about his investment. Maybe a minority don't but on a whole, they care. If they don't care we can't predict what they will do anyway, regardless of the economics.

For any stakeholder (at least <50%) the personal reward is greater than the share that hurts the value of that stakeholders share of steem's total value.

You're talking here in terms of the number of people. Someone who has 1 million Steem is more vested than someone with 1 Steem. They don't have the same amount of $ to lose, not the same vested interest.

On Steem the incentives are counted in Steem. If people don't care about their Steem it's futile to try to predict their actions based on economics. So the majority shareholders have more to lose and should according to behavioral economics care about the net worth of the Steem network. Their own net worth health first pass by the value of the Steem rather than their reward.

Thanks for a response. Good content are being rewarded greatly now from a few specific sources. The new system would leech off misterdelegation to put more in lazy curators pockets.

Yes I don't think someone that is unhappy right now will magically become happy with any system change. Since bitter people tend to stay bitter. As they are annoyed with human behaviour. 50/50 again implies that the curator do as much work as the high Stake holders. They don't. Content creators take the highest risk.

I would agree that your system could work if you want a level playing field. With no true empowered people. But I believe some content creators are 100x better than others in creation. And 50/50 would never attract them to stay.

I'm not really sure how downvotes can achieve the aim of allowing opinion to compete anyway, without a culture being crafted that actually values opinion (I wouldn't use the word opinion, since there are many posts that aren't opinions).
Maybe we will just see downvotes being put up for sale too ;)

I am starting to feel this might be an impossible puzzle wherein the inherent conflict of pure creativity vs. pure capitalist mentality cannot co-exist. The only viable solution, as with offline life, is for the hearts and minds of those involved to operate with shared agreements - which we do not currently have here. e.g. in the offline world, a musician might find they are struggling with the financially based demands of a label boss - whereas here, the more creative are met with a similar effect from those with Steem Power who simply demand 'roi'. But if the offline musician finds a label boss who also values music over money, then things can go well for all involved.

It seems the social aspect of a social network just doesn't really work unless those involved intend to be social. lol

Thx for a good reply,

"Let me continue that role by saying this: nathanmars is doing incredible work and there are a few others like him who are empowering fellow creators like yourself, however: that is not a scalable model."

Well it is actually scalable. Empower people and magic happens in the long run. Investing in others is a scalable model. History has proven that the last 100 years.

"What you're hoping for is a perfect world where people who have abundance are willing to share that abundance with others. I wish it were otherwise, but it simply is not human nature to act in accordance to those principles."

If you take a look the last 100 years you can again see that abundance has gone up. And people are sharing it. Most places that have a more capitalist approach and not socialist approach are creating massive freedom. Life is still competition though.

"Believe me - if you can incentivize people to reward themselves AND reward fellow creators, then my friend, you are in business!"

Content creators are already doing this on the Steem Blockchain. And it works.

Well I'm with you that I think experiments will be done with Smart Media Tokens. And that it will create all kinds of results

This isn't about leveling the playing field between content creators and curators. I don't even see this as a fight between them. The goal is to direct rewards towards posts that the majority of stakeholders actually like.

First, 50/50 doesn't imply equal rewards to authors and curators. One person (author) gets 50% of the reward, and the rest is split among many curators. That split is then determined by two things: who curates first and the relative stakes (investment risk) of the curators.

Also, I believe 50/50 curation would end up rewarding those content creators that you think are 10x better more than the current system does. Because the current system just encourages self-voting over finding posts you like.

Most people care about their investment

Yes of course but this applies at any size. Someone who has worked his or her ass off to accumulate two dollars worth of SP may care about it more than a while with a million dollars worth. Don't be blinded (or attempt to blind) that "large" dollars figures somehow automatically convey some more sincere or "better" intent. They don't.

On Steem the incentives are counted in Steem. If people don't care about their Steem it's futile to try to predict their actions based on economics

Sure, and everyone can care or not care about their Steem. The amount being 'large' doesn't inherently change anything, except maybe how YOU perceive it.

So the majority shareholders have more to lose and should according to behavioral economics care about the net worth of the Steem network. Their own net worth health first pass by the value of the Steem rather than their reward.

That doesn't follow. It can apply (or not) equally to stakeholders of any size.

Thanks again for a nice response,

The majority I just think never will have a good taste. So a rule by the majority may have some benefits just as we see in the world. But I think it will lead to a waste of Steem into the wrong hands. I think it will lead to more mediocrity. A bit like welfare can have some benefits.

If a person just has 15,000 SP then they can simulate one 15% upvote daily from 2M SP account in ROI just by using promotion services. So the power is not in high Stake holders. Proof-of-brain has already outsourced Human curators role.

You can run your own show with just a few thousand Steem and don't even have to look at all the drama. People want to automate more that is very clear. Since it makes their life easy and frictionless.

Of course that makes Stake holders feel awkward in their role as they don't usually have a solid content strategy. They could care less about content many. It becomes artificial and fake to produce something daily if you are not passionate about something.

They should invest in content creators instead of trying to become one themselves by doing mediocre content. Investing in real human brains will give them 10-100x ROI instead of trying to chase small 10-20% boosts in ROI. If they invest in content creators they never have to expand energy themselves to write posts ---> More time over for bigger projects.

I rather have 1 million SP in 1 competent person than spread it out in 1000 mediocre people. 1000 ppl with more Stake may look good on paper. And I'm sure it may even make Steem value grow more than what it currently will.

I think the harder system is good right now since it creates discipline and creates people that values their earned Stake much more. The hard is what makes it great. If something needs to be taken care of and people have high Stake then it can be taken care of. If everyone is just mediocre then that would just breed confusion.

Don't be blinded (or attempt to blind) that "large" dollars figures somehow automatically convey some more sincere or "better" intent. They don't.

I've used the term more vested interest.

The amount being 'large' doesn't inherently change anything, except maybe how YOU perceive it.

The amount matters. Different amounts will be perceived differently for people but what people value they don't want to lose.

That doesn't follow. It can apply (or not) equally to stakeholders of any size.

Could you re-phrase that?

The answer back then (the question had been asked many times) was that it was "easy to manipulate" (simply reloading the page with F5 apparently) and therefore irrelevant or worse, misguiding. I am not convinced at all by that argument.

Knowing how many people have actually read a post or watched a video is extremely useful. The fact that the "viewcount" indicator was not perfect and could be manipulated should have been a reason to IMPROVE IT in order to make it more precise, not to remove it all together!

It's like: "Oh, you twisted your ankle and are limping now! It would seem that this leg is not helping you walk well! How sad! ... I'll therefore saw off your leg altogether, so you'll be rid of this bad leg that's making you limp!"

The issue of engagement and of distributing wealth in proportion with perceived quality of contribution is real and very important. However the proposed solution is simplistic and has been argued against already.

Now after a number of months with N^2 rewards (back in 2016) and more than a year with linear rewards, instead of "writing a letter" and then pumping it to trending in order to start a polemic, why not use the blockchain data and do a comparative analysis?

Extract the blockchain data from the 2 periods and look at whatever indicators you think most relevant (wealth distribution for instance under n^2 and under linear). Compare the figures: was it better with n^2 ? Or is it better with linear ? Do a regression analysis if you have to, do covariance analysis if it helps and come with mathematical proof that one or another is better for the goal that you state (which I share and I believe most people share)

Could you re-phrase that?

Someone with 2 STEEM may very well be as concerned, if not more concerned, about its value dropping than someone with 1 million STEEM. Pushing all of the influence over rewards to the latter an then relying on them having 'more to lose' from the value of STEEM decreasing is nonsense that does not work, both in theory and in practice.

There is no incentive of good stewardship that scales with the size of stake, as the whitepaper suggests (as do you). It's a false model.

When you upvote you have a choice of:

1. Upvote yourself (some people do this with literally empty comments; others are more subtle)
2. Upvote some content at random or for some other non-monetary, non-value reason.
3. Upvote some content on merit/opinion.

When you downvote, your choices are:

1. Downvote yourself.
2. Downvote some content at random or for some other non-monetary, non-value reason.
3. Downvote some content on merit/opinion.

Review these lists carefully and then tell me whether you think it is more likely that people upvote or downvote based on merit/opinion.

Everyone has different motives. Users such as @v4vapid and myself tend to vote more to promote content - whereas many other users vote purely for financial gain. Steem presents a mixture of key selling points that both include financial gain and the ability to post transparently (uncensored) and in a fair way. We have here, therefore, a mixture of capitalism and the desire for free communication both competing for the same space. What combines all of these together is liberty, in a sense - or something approaching anarchy.

I personally upvote my own posts and then mostly only upvote posts based on content/opinion. I don't downvote due to disagreement (unless in extreme circumstances) and I don't downvote due to use of bots. While I might feel motivated to downvote due to the use of bots - I prefer solving the problem in a more uniform way instead of some bot users getting downvoted while others aren't.

In terms of the behavior of other users, I don't have accurate data on that - but I do know that there is a split between people who think that bid bots are 'valuable businesses' (lol) and those who vote based on opinion/content.

I don't think that really got at the point. Of course there are always users with different motivations. The common threads that runs through all are the incentives that are built into the system. People will respond differently to them but all respond in some manner. It's almost impossible, if not actually impossible, to participate in the system at all without doing so.

With that in mind I think should be clear from the above why downvotes are naturally much more effective than upvotes in getting voters to express an opinon, considering incentives across a range of personalities, motivations, etc. When you look at the current system where a very large amount of vote power (and a correspondingly large amount of the reward pool) is deployed in a manner that does not particularly (if at all) involve expressing opinion aka proof-of-brain, it is clear this outcome is tied more to upvoting than downvoting (aside from the overall scarcity of the latter).

This comment is supported by $8.06 @tipU upvote funded by @sorin.cristescu :)
@tipU voting service guide | STEEM Monsters Lottery | Quick SBD <-> STEEM Exchange | For investors.

I'll admit it, you have totally lost me here.. lol
I'm finding it hard to track your points - maybe I am missing something. From my perspective, the issue I want to see solved - and the issue that most people I speak to want to see solved, is that actual proof of brain is being replaced with 'proof of wallet'. So we have a situation akin to corporate mainstream media instead of 'the voice of the people' - which is, really by definitions, what people actually want/need. I don't see how downvotes can really achieve that without a coherent effort from the community to continually downvote - to the point of it being quite time consuming. The financial reward for those doing the upvoting (of themselves and co-conspirators) will motivate them to spend their time doing that.. but for downvoters, there is no guaranteed reward, yet they are using their time to 'police' things. From a 'business' perspective, the motivation and reward for abusing the situation remains higher than it is for trying to fix the situation with downvotes. When it is considered that downvotes can ALSO be used to aid in abuse of the situation, I find it hard to think they will be helpful overall.

On the other hand, by empowering users to be able to take direct and permanent action to remove abusers from their experience, we at least give users the opportunity to clean up their own feed and trending pages. This won't automatically stop the real abusers from still abusing the system, but it is easy to imagine a situation where abusers realise that their posts literally aren't being seen by anyone and thus the only benefit they get from posting and buying votes is whatever small return they get from the bidbots and nothing else. The system could also display the accounts that are being vote muted the most across the network - inspiring others to join in. I think this is a much more powerful option than is being recognised here.

I am all for just doing what works - if super charging downvotes works, then do that - but I feel it brings a disturbance in the force ;)

Let me distill it down to the essence. The goal of proof-of-brain is to get people to vote based on opinion. Downvotes can do that just as well as upvotes. Downvoting what you think is low-value is just the flip side of upvoting what you think is high value.

The difference is that upvotes can be turned into a cheat mode where you just vote to reward yourself, downvotes can't. The bottom line is that whatever else you think about downvotes, they are a much better way to end up with proof-of-brain that doesn't collapse into proof-of-self-enrichment.

But downvotes return rewards to the reward pool, which then increase your own payout. So even if you don't really disagree with people's posts, you might be inspired to use the 'cheat mode' of downvotes to negate other people's posts to increase your own payout. up/down votes are just different paths to the same outcome. the effect of downvotes is more diffused, since the rewards that are returned to the pool are distributed by all users and don't just go to the downvoter, but the effect on a logical level is the same (less payout for someone and more for the voter).. With sufficient SP held by a single account, downvoting could make a significant difference to the amount paid out to that account. This could be prevented by having rewards that are taken from posts via downvoting then being redistributed to somewhere else, such as a charity pool or a 'project budget' pool or something like that - instead of going back to the general rewards pool..

There are two differences:

1. The effect is vastly smaller. Let's put some numbers on it. The largest account (excluding steemit) has about 3%. Which means (assuming 3% stakeholder is efficient in capturing 3% of the reward pool; not a given at all) 97% of a downvote by that account goes to others and 3% goes to the downvoter. With self-upvotes, 100% goes to the voter, so the effect is 30x stronger for upvotes. For everyone else the disparity is even greater. If we can fix 97% of a problem we should not dismiss that just because 3% might remain.
2. Even downvoting with that up to 3% incentive in mind, it costs you nothing to also express an opinion in choosing which content to downvote. Unlike upvotes, the economic incentives do not require you to choose between your own economic benefit and expressing an opinion. You can still do so at no extra cost. (If you don't, you don't, we certainly can't force people but at least we're not paying them extra to undermine proof-of-brain.)

We could consider other aspects of it such as the fact that your own content might also get downvoted if others have a low opinion of it relative to its payout so you can't assume that downvoting other content necessarily increases the net payouts on yours (or that it even makes sense for you to post at all). That's not necessary though, since even without these additional considerations, we can already see that expressing an opinion via downvotes has much better incentives than doing so with upvotes, per #1 and #2 above.

redistributed to somewhere else, such as a charity pool or a 'project budget' pool or something like that - instead of going back to the general rewards pool..

That's vaguely plausible but I'm not convinced it is necessary. Stakeholders can use upvotes and downvotes to push rewards to charity payouts if that's where they want them to go. Expressing opinions via downvotes makes it far more likely this actually happens if people want it to.

Yes, the amounts involved in the gains from downvoting are smaller than from upvoting, but there are counter points here:

1. I know from the interviews done by Tim Cliff that the biggest account holders here tend to have multiple accounts and some of their multiple accounts are large! So while the largest account may hold 3%, we don't know how many of those large accounts are held by any one user. They could have 10 - making 30%! How would we know? I'm not sure that we do - as long as accounts are anonymous. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of the largest accounts and which ones are anonymous or not proven to be held be a 'real' person.

2. So, following on from point 1 - enhanced downvotes increases the gap between the rich and the poor, unless the rich are somehow going to become the super responsible content police and we have no reason to think that would happen... They don't even have enough time to do that. The amount of content involved means that this can ONLY practically be done by a decentralised method - such as with voter muting or something similar.

3. In cases where users are posting a certain type of content, they may only have 2/3 competitors - so if they are able to downvote and remove their competitors consistently, due to having higher SP - then they very well could do that and the result would be a monopoly on that niche and also then their own gains would be signficantly higher than just the small gains made by returning rewards to the pool (As mentioned above).

4. As already highlighted, there is more involved here than pure money. The issue of post discovery is involved and that comes in to the monopoly and free speech issue again. If new users come into this network expecting free speech (since it is one of the selling points) and find that their own viewpoint is unpopular among the prevailing SP whales of the day, then now their voice can be easily squashed and they will likely leave. At least when downvotes are tied to SP and there is a consideration of personal financial cost for downvoting, there is less motivation to act to silence the opposition. We already have a huge issue with user retention here and imo that is significantly due to the bid bots (and ninja mining etc.) - if our attempt to solve this does not take fully into consideration that the solution must not cause the problems for new users to just change form, then the attempts will probably fail. In this case, the problem of being 'out-gunned' and denied by those with the most SP (negating proof of brain) could, for many voices, just change form from not being able to be discovered due to the bid bot wars to literally not being seen by hardly anyone due to downvote domination. It would be nice to think that users would be smart enough to recognise the value of bringing in new users and having the network grow - thus learning and allowing respect for others users.. However, I know from 15 years of social networking and forums (including steem) that many people simply will not do that and will be anti-social regardless of the overall effect on the network. In fact, this is a potential attack vector by competing networks.

That's vaguely plausible but I'm not convinced it is necessary. Stakeholders can use upvotes and downvotes to push rewards to charity payouts if that's where they want them to go. Expressing opinions via downvotes makes it far more likely this actually happens if people want it to.

The point is that by forcing the changes introduced by downvotes to go to a third party or to projects that are meant to benefit steem, the actual downvoter does not personally benefit in a way that is out of balance with everyone else - the point is to demotivate them from gaming the downvote process.

Thank you @sorin.lite. This is the most info I got from anyone on the matter. So, I really appreciate you taking the time to fill me in. I like your way of thinking and your analogy at the end is spot on. It boggles the mind how people can create something wonderful like Steemit, but take away something so precious from it without much thought or consideration. I guess there are things that we just have to accept in life, despite their ridiculousness. Too many. God bless you.

No, you did not.

!shitpost

https://i.imgur.com/Akrk2h0.png

Glad to see that you're starting hard conversations around improving Steem.

The viewcount is okay, but it's only view count from Steemit.com. There are so many other Steem websites that can generate views.

Wow I keep seeing your comments and keep seeing ppl downvote you, very weird.

They could have 10 - making 30%! How would we know?

30% is actually a lot. Most of the largest account owners are known. But even if it were it wouldn't matter. 30% is still better than 100% and a 30% stakeholder who can gain a 30% benefit from part of the reward pool does not accrue any advantage out of balance with stake (in fact likely much smaller).

enhanced downvotes increases the gap between the rich and the poor

It doesn't really. In the hypothetical that everyone is participating in the reward pool, the immediate gain is less than proportional to stake because you can't downvote everything and you only gain back your stake share of the portion that you do downvote. There is no disproportionate advantage to being rich here. And ultimately there are still opinions being expressed and adding value to the system that way (unlike self-upvotes).

The amount of content involved means that this can ONLY practically be done by a decentralised method - such as with voter muting or something similar.

This is exactly why we need downvotes to be widely used by people expressing many individual opinions in a decentralized network. Smaller accounts can downvote smaller and/or more obscure overvalued content, or can just pile together and do their part. Larger account holders may focus on larger rewards.

the actual downvoter does not personally benefit in a way that is out of balance with everyone else

The actual downvoter does not gain out of balance with everyone else given the status quo of rewards going back to the pool. That's the whole point. They gain the same as everyone else (in the pool) except the one item of content they happened to downvote. This is about the same really. In the case where the the diversion is "meant to benefit steem", the person who owns 3% still gains more than the person who owns 0.1%, and the person who got downvoted loses relative to anyone else. There is no difference!

In the case of a charity that doesn't benefit steem at all, maybe, but then you have other issues of who chooses the charity and whether that choice actually benefits someone somehow.

Nothing is perfect but all of everything both of us has written still demonstrates is that downvotes are still far less exploitable for personal gain than upvotes and far more aligned with expressing opinons and proof of brain.

Voter muting or any other sort of analysis of data intended to recommend content can certainly be used at the UI level but has no relevance to rewards or proof of brain. You don't even need a blockchain to recommend content at all for that matter.

Also, your example of a niche does not work as long as anyone else actually cares about the niche (if not then the discussion is pointless). The downvoter's own content being overvalued will attract downvotes and other downvoted, now-undervalued content will attract upvotes. One single downvote (or upvote) does not end the game, it invites others to express their opinions too.

More broadly, you shouldn't assume that the goal is for stakeholders to not have influence. If a large stakeholder has a strong opinion over some niche or even that some group of new users should be downvoted, it isn't improper for that opinion to matter a lot, even potentially to the point of monopoly (until and unless more stake takes an interest in the matter). It is still an opinion after all and proof-of-brain does not mean proof that others think the same way that you or I do. The goal in fact is absolutely for stakeholders (including large ones) to have influence but for it to be expressed in the form of opinion over reward allocation (even if, again, you or I do not like the outcome) rather than purely self-enrichment.

As already highlighted, there is more involved here than pure money

The money component has to work at a broad level first. Given that proof-of-brain and incentives to grow and create value via voter-allocated inflation are the flagship features which differentiate Steem in a crowded market, it is imperative that those work.

Once that is on solid ground we can talk about softer goals likes free speech, unpopular viewpoints and such. Free speech isn't even an issue here unless you believe people have a right to have others carry the cost of their speech, and I disagree.

I will in some very simplistic way prove the person doing the less amount of work currently have the best ROI. Those who engage ithe least in "proof-of-brain".

That will show that the current system falls short. It does not, in any way, condone nonlinear rewards. Just because we change something that's "not good enough" does not mean whatever we replace it with will automatically be "better". It can very well be ... even worse !

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That could be part of the reason. Resteem services also dish out 300 worthless votes for 1 or 2 SBD.