Update: It looks like the behavior I noticed may have changed. The tests I had done were prior to HF20 and crossed the HF20 activation threshold. In other words, a vote was cast under HF19 at 0 minutes, HF20 was activated, and the vote showed no value a few hours later (so 100% vote loss, not just curation rewards). I am conducting another test below with a comment that was voted at 0 minutes and I'm not seeing the same behavior but I will monitor it until payout.
One of the changes in Hard Fork 20 changes how curation works. The curation window dropped from 30 minutes down to 15 minutes. It also changed the curation rewards for the first 15 minutes to go to the reward pool instead of the author.
While this reduction from 30 minutes to 15 minutes is a great change, it introduces a situation where your voting power can be burned as much as 100% if you vote early. This is to penalize self-voting and allow curators to have the same chance for curation as the author.
What changed?
In the past, there were situations where early votes were not self-votes and actually organic curation. In fact, this was very common, especially in the last 15 minutes of the 30-minute window. Under Hard Fork 19, your vote still mattered, either the curators or the author would get the portion of the vote that was being lost in that first 30 minutes. If you really wanted to support an author, you could vote really early and give them an even larger vote by sacrificing curation rewards.
Under the new system, doing this can significantly reduce your vote value as it is now returned to the reward pool. For posts, this won't be a huge concern once people figure out the new timing and adjust to it, but for comments, I think this is a big change that will bite a lot of people in the ass.
Why are comments different?
Many authors like to engage with their readers and check replies frequently and respond quickly. This is considered a very favorable practice, but it isn't uncommon to respond to comments within the first few minutes of a comment. Especially if you are a @ginabot user and you get a notification for a mention, it isn't uncommon I can respond within a minute or even seconds of a comment. If it is a good one, I would normally upvote it. Under Hard Fork 20, a $1 vote at 1 minute turns into a $0.06 vote to the author, and near $0.00 of that goes to curators. 94% of your voting power is burned to dust. That's a huge change.
This creates a situation where users will do one of the following things:
- Vote within first few minutes and lose (burn) 70-90% of their vote value
- Respond later or just remember to vote later
- Respond, but don't bother voting or think about voting later and forgetting
User Experience
All three of these situations result in a bad user experience. While I believe it will be fairly rare most users will try to reward a post within the first five minutes organically (but it does and will happen), comments this is a very different scenario. Early voting for comments is actually a good thing as it happens organically with high engagement.
Why you should vote me as witness
Witness
Active, Present, Passionate
My recent popular posts
STEEM, STEEM Power, Vests, and Steem Dollars. wtf is this shit?
The truth and lies about 25% curation, why what you know is FAKE NEWS
WTF is a hardware wallet, and why should you have one?
GINABOT - The Secret to your Sanity on Steemit
How to calculate post rewards
Use SSH all the time? Time for a big boy SSH Client
How to change your recovery account
How curation rewards work and how to be a kick-ass curator
Markdown 101 - How to make kick-ass posts on Steemit
Work ON your business, not in your business! - How to succeed as a small business
You are not entitled to an audience, you need to earn it!
How to properly setup SSH Key Authentication - If you are logging into your server with root, you are doing it wrong!
Building a Portable Game Console
Yup.
I can see myself opening tabs up, writing replies ready to submit at around 15 mins with a vote, and forgetting.
That's for the replies I would consider voting for. The rest will either be ignored or replied to right away.
I agree, As a forgetful person myself. I could see this regularily happening.
Automation could come in handy here. But just sad it has to be that way...
This can be handled by third-party front ends by buffering votes until 15 minutes for comments. I know certain front ends already buffer comments for 3 seconds for next block.
What about notification tools optionally delaying their notifications by 0, 7.5 or 15 minutes?
Or perhaps they could have an option to notify twice. Once for the initial appearance and a second time when votes are optimal.
That's a very good point. I guess we may see front ends offering delayed votes for self voters too.
Thank you for the heads up about the timing. I did that just before reading your post. That's why is good to read first.
Might be done as a browser-plugin replacing the votes button. Should be no big deal. But is it worth? When voting I just have the author in mind who is not affected.
I don't think this is correct. $0.75 still goes to the author regardless of when you cast it, it's just a question of where the curation rewards go.
It is nice to see someone else complaining about this, though, as I've been kind of getting tired of it. :)
That is not how I have been seeing it. I just posted this comment and immediately upvoted it 100%. (~$1 vote). I had a post the other day after the fork that had an auto vote, and it showed the full vote value, then not long later the vote changed from ~$10 to $0.04. (Will see how this comment pays out). I can't explain why it shows $10 initially, then an hour later it was $0.04 but that would fit the scenario I explained.
Test
If so this is a bug. It's not intended behavior.
Very possible, might have been something with 0.20.2 (which is what we were on at the time), but I did see it first hand do exactly as I describe, but very strangely it initially showed the full vote value.
That sounds like a weird condenser bug. It shouldn't show up on the display at all.
I'm starting to think it might have been. I had to remove a $10 vote and re-execute it because it was pretty much zero'd as it was done with the post.
Interesting experiment. Let's see the result. I'll keep an eye on it too. Thanks
interesting, lets see what happens if you upvote this comment 100% ;)
.
It was this post, a vote was made immediately and it showed up in the condenser as it normally would.
https://steemit.com/curation/@buildawhale/buildawhale-curation-digest-09-25-18
When I looked from my main account, probably around 1 hour later, it showed it only had $0.04 and that vote was on the post. I removed the vote and tried again, and it showed properly. But now I am unable to mimic the behavior and think it might have been related to v0.20.2 as it was on the 25th when hard fork just happened to land.
I have a post above I am using a test to see how it pays out. But I may have been wrong, this may have been an issue with an older build and has been corrected.
.
Was this your first vote after the fork? Those were exceptionally weird.
The vote was before the fork but I noticed it after.
Yes, that's how I understand it as well. It is the curation reward that will turn into dust. The author will now always get 75% of the reward. So early voting will no longer bump the reward to the author. For the curator there is no change compared to HF19, except for the threshold decrease to 15min.
That's how I understood it should be, but I was not seeing that right after the hard fork landed on the 25th. I ended up removing the vote and re-executing it like an hour after the post and it registered as a full vote. I'm starting to suspect something was fixed between v0.20.2 and where we are now.
In fact, now that I think of it, I think the vote was right before HF20 was launched. It was after HF20 when I noticed the vote didn't count but was on the post.
It seems we all complain a lot about hf20 these days.
The only thing, next to showing up all errors and miscalculations in HF20, is to remove our witness votes from the top20 witnesses, who all agreed to it and found nothing wrong with it.
Not one opposed it.
All went immediately to the next version.
It looks as if T20 witnesses are super fast at code review and testing.
But on the other hand..
You already vote for good witnesses and rarely any t20
No need for me to preach here.. Sorry:)
I don't mind. I figured out a while ago that my vote is meaningful to witnesses outside the top 20 - it increases their chances of getting a block - and almost meaningless to those in the top group.
Hi! The behavior you have described does not seem to be intended. Only the curation rewards (25% to 0% scaling linearly for first 15 mins) is returned, so the author should still get 75%.
It says the "early voting penalty" is returned, which is the 25% at 0 mins, so the author should still be getting 75% (at all times instead of the old 100% to 75% scale) and curators have the same scale as before (0% to 25%).
I hope this is correct and makes sense!
Hi Mark. Waited for the 15 minute mark and it is a little more hands on now. I never really cared about when I voted but making more of an effort to actually think about it now.
and I want to vote your comment, but it's 2 minutes old. My $1 vote is now worth 13 cents, and I get $0 in curation rewards.
A good example here. I'll likely forget about this by the time it gets closer to 15 minutes, especially since I'm going to bed.
Good point. Was wandering why some peoples comments I voted on were different with curation so must remember to wait on comments as well. Makes sense now. Have already voted on a comment straight away recently now will remember to wait. Thanks you have been a big help.
It's really nice explanation there Mark, although I think that the votes (either it is for the comments or the post itself) are not affected at all.
What IS affected though, is the curation rewards for each vote. Meaning that your 1$ vote on a comment will still be 1$ even under the first minute but the curation rewards for that comment if it is voted within the first minute, drastically reduces.
If I am wrong plz someone correct me here
WHAT!? I really don't like the whole voting deal. I love to give my followers large comment votes to encourage more comments and conversation. I understand how this can be helpful in a post scenario. But bad for comments. I wish there was a difference.
I am someone who likes to respond to comments and I upvote the ones I like, so the 15min rule for comments def bites me in the ass.
!pancakes
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Excellent illustration
Nothing has changed @themarkymark. I have an account who votes for me at zero minutes. He has been doing this since way before HF20, possibly as far back as HF18 he started.
He is actually a friend who doesn't bother with Steemit anymore, and I've told him to change the time of his vote several times. As he get's zero rewards by voting for me on zero minutes.
The only change is who his reward goes to, before it went to me, now it goes back to the pool.
(voting up for visibility).
Cg
This is certainly going to hurt user experience. We will eventually adjust, but it will take a lot of time and things may not be the same
Hahaaaa. My scenario works great then. Comment, move on and check steemworld.org at the end of the day and go back to upvote / respond. Lol. Finally my lazyness pays off.
Thank you for this post. I was trying to figure this out earlier today and going round in circles with voting on posts and comments and checking to see what was happening. My vote is only worth about 4 maybe 5 cents.
If i vote on someones post that gets no other votes besides mine there's a chance they wont get paid at all if it's less than a 2 cent payout right? I would like to support people as much as i can but i don't want to throw away votes... now my head is spinning again to compute all this and time things...
Why STEEM whyyyyy??!! lol I thought it was supposed to be getting better? :D
https://steemit.com/busy/@sugamadhiakri/why-hard-fork-20-is-a-failure-everyone-will-agree-on-this
I'm not spamming to get an upvote. I just want to express the difficulties faced by the new users and I want it to get noticed.
Yeah, the effect on comments is my biggest concern. I am also worried about Newbies and their RC levels. Comments used to be the way they engaged with established users but if they struggle to comment because they have used up their RC this is a problem. Thanks for letting me know about the vote burn. I think I have already burnt some steem on quick comment response. Bugger.
This gets more like work everyday. We have lots of newcomers in one of our community, they struggle with understanding the votes at full power scenario never mind anything more complicated.
On the plus side, I guess it does encourage good internet hygiene - maybe checking your responses once or twice a day, rather than continually on.
Frack. I wish they hadn't messed with the timing at all if this is the result. Just kill self voting even being possible if that's the concern.
The problem is not self voting it's the problem that self voting reduced the amount of curation for other people because it shifted a big portion to the author. It was planned that 25% of the voting get back to the curators but in the end it was less than 25% because some % went directly to the author. And that's what they are trying to fix.
Posted using Partiko Android
You can't kill self voting because people will just run multiple accounts and shift power to the secondary account for voting instead of their main account that they post from.
That wouldn't work as you would burn the curation regardless who made the vote if voting inside of 15 minutes.
I think there will be solution if somebody like @steem-plus or @steempeak can create option to cast your vote after time. You setup thing that you wanna give somebody upvote after 20 minutes and you can go do wathever it is. After 20 minutes Steem-Plus will cast your vote for amount you wanted.
SteemPeak already queues votes for 3 seconds to enter into a new block and been discussed to add this functionality.
Wonderful explanation of HF20 and its merits and demerits. I will follow them.
I upvoted your post.
Best regards,
@Council
Posted using https://Steeming.com condenser site.
Timing is a biggest challenge
Then there should be room for some tools/bots to vote on the comment at certain timing(after 15min) to maximally reward the author. While the parent author can still respond as quickly as they used to be.
Resteemed this as relevant to all users and curators - just in case voters are not aware of the 15 minutes rule and the new early selfvote penalty (bookmarkt this comment @themarkymark for a vote in 15 minutes 😎)
So basically they just killed comment rewards? Brilliant, there are not enough people commenting and curating already and now they just made it pointless to do so. Is there an ideal time to self vote or is that now totally blown?
(take your time getting back to me I suppose!)
Good to know. Although the majority of the times I really don't think too much on the curation rewards. I should lolol
Posted using Partiko Android
Gonna have to create a command for a bot to upvote the parent post with a timer and percentage. 😂
!upvote 15 100
As a non-techie, it's hard for me to keep it all straight. I will just keep on reading everyone's input on the HF20 and see if I can "get it" before the next HF. Still learning still growing....even after 49 years on this gorgeous planet.
OMG! I didn't noticed that comment vote is also get considered as a normal post. This is a great disadvantage author can't support for the users who they are eagerly making a engagement.
How will this update be good for us everyone?
Posted using Partiko Android
A vote on the 5th day is roughly equal to a vote at 15 minutes, we'll just have to review comments for voting at a point in the near future?
Not really, a vote at 15 minutes get it's curation rewards and all other votes after it. A vote at five days will get almost no curation rewards.
Lol, my curation rewards don't add up to enough to worry about,...that's how it is when you only vote posts with less than a dollar on them,...
I agree. This change is terrible for human beings, but does little for bots, since they can be programmed to vote at exactly the desired time. I had this concern since HF20 was announced, but sadly there is really nothing the vast majority of us can do to prevent such changes. Unless you have the majority of the SP you really don't have much of a say on the Steem blockchain. So what we have now is a clear signal that bots are more important than humans on Steem. Not a good move for a social network.
Proud member of #steemitbloggers @steemitbloggers
Thanks so much for the explanation. When I started doing the Question of the Day, I decided to upvote each person who commented (only their initial comment). I will definitely be waiting to upvote those comments until that first 15 minutes. Thanks again,
Ren
I’m going to be down to zero voting power and have to wait five days if I upvote comments? - I won’t be doing that.
I hardly think I or other users will think that go back and vote for their favorite comments within the allotted time frame to avoid this crippling change.
Very sad turn of events on this front.
Thank you for explaining that, I have been wondering how that would work out. I still am not entirely sure what the best time to comment or to vote is anymore but, I think a lot of it comes down to being in the right place at the right time, and sometimes I don't get back on here and so I just vote when I'm there. Thats probably not the best strategy, right?
Okay, in amongst all the whining posts and people who are self-congratulating themselves on still being around during the HF, this is at least a useful post. Thanks.
All they had to was just make the user experience better and screw over the shit content, now at that expense they’re screwing over the user base.
Posted using Partiko iOS
thanks you @themarkymark for sharing all those valuable informations, I didn't hear about yet ! That's big changes ! Have a very nice Sunday !
Congratulations @themarkymark!
Your post was mentioned in the Steemit Hit Parade in the following category:
thanks for this, however, does this new system have any of such effect on votes on posts? In other words, what is the best time to vote on posts?
Thank you for the information... sigh... I tend to try (not today cos I've been off grid in Nature) and not be shy commenting and voting (whenever) I see right away... I am going to see on the go if I can resume my normal activity and keep it up as I don't want to overthink whenever or how, or how much I should comment not be penalized :/. I agree providing feedback is a healthy practise... it's an encouraging practise to many, even to myself and for me that might be the biggest fear about the hf20. What keeps me in Steemit is engagement and of course reaching an "audience". Thanks always for the info, Mark. Lots of popcorn and pancakes for you!
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