Is this that big of an issue? I find spam in the hope of some small reward on every social platform. Whether it is Instagram accounts hoping to follow/like people at random in the hope of bringing some % back to their page where they have some affiliate links or products, or Facebook friend requests with links to scams.
Imo, it would be a mistake to trade of any improvement to user experience in the effort to fight abuse. It would be better to lower the barriers of entry as much as possible, to increase user retention as much as possible, and make our "product" easier to understand and use as possible, even if it meant allowing for some more abuse.
We have far bigger problems to solve than any of the worst abuse that our chain is currently experiencing, or has experienced in the past, namely how we can attract, retain and sustain a growing userbase with properly aligned economics to benefit the token value. We can min-max efforts to limit bread crumb farmers after we've solved that.
I don't think we can compare the comment spam on traditional social media to hive. The reward system changes everything. Although I agree that we have bigger issues I feel that removing the economic barriers to comment farming will exacerbate rent seeking behaviour. The real question is if the tradeoff is worth it.
That's the question I am asking. And the only point I was making. Namely that the tradeoffs in terms of added barriers to entry of new users, and added difficulties of growth for grassroots communities, is not worth the small benefit of less abuse.
The big picture that we need to look at is that hive is a value extracting platform. That is the reality of our situation as exemplified by the flow to exchanges.
At the end of the day hive is mostly purchased to speculate on it (like 99.9% of all cryptos). More than 42% of the available supply (total supply minus the DAO) is on exchanges. For example bitcoin only has ~13%...that is a big difference.
The potential increase in spam may turn out to be a "nothing burger". I am not convinced that changing the convergent linear rewards curve is necessary but I am not opposed to be proven wrong.
I'd be more interested in comparing with numbers for other smaller blockchain projects rather than bitcoin.
The convergent linear reward curve devalues the tokens of anybody without enough to over come the tax.
It also killed comment rewards.
If it isn't removed it needs to be lowered to 100hp, or less.
160k hp is unrealistic.
Anybody that buys in at less than ~80k usd gets a diluted stake?
Who buys that?
It's not about how much HP you have, it's about how much is payed out per post. I have ~20k and if I vote on content that does not get to the point where the payout becomes linear it is worth about half of what it could be but it is worth more than that on higher rewarded posts.
One the one hand the convergent curve discourages spam but as you pointed out the tradeoff is that accounts that do not get regular votes from high powered accounts have a lower incentive to post or comment.
If we had millions of users with a more even distribution of stake it would not be much of an issue. Content creators with a large following similar to what we see on regular social media could make bank without the support of large stakeholders. But we are not there yet.
16hive x .57 = 9.12htu = ~310k hp to overcome the tax.
Everybody with less than ~310k hp are having their stake reduced in influence on the pool.
If you have 155k hp, your tax is ~25%.
If you have less than 155k hp, your tax is up to 50%.
Would you buy hive, and power up, knowing that unless you powerup over 176k usd's worth your influence is reduced the less you do powerup, then on top of that, if you don't vote 100%, or combine on a post that equals that 100%, you lose money because you are too poor to play with the big people.
I can't believe I've missed this angle for as long as I have, I'm slipping.
My curation ROI is ~19% which is well above the inflation schedule, add another 3% for staking rewards to the mix and I am almost doing a 3x. What i think you are not considering is the ratio of vested hive against the virtual supply. Since not all of the hive is powered up a larger portion of the inflation goes to the stake that is active.
Of course not everyone has the same results but I have been around here for almost 5 years and I know how and when to vote. I don't even need to use a voting bot (only about 20%-25% of my votes are automated).
I anticipate that the next hardork will reduce my curation ROI but I am not sure by how much.
I doubt we will ever have a million daily posters, just for the record.
We don't need them, 100k is plenty.
When I am talking about millions I am referring to content consumers not content producers.
I do think the spam hurts user experience. It's not so much the rewards themselves I'm concerned about it is the secondary effects. 1. Spam itself is distracting, and insufficiently controlled can be an outright denial of service. 2. Comments are very expensive operation on the blockchain (vastly higher than votes, transfers, etc.). Out of control spam comments will drive up RC costs and become an impediment to the value adding user experience we want.
We mostly lack the abilities that centralized platforms have to shut down (some, probably the vast majority of) spammers programmatically, or at all, by identifying bots and such (since it violates their ToS, and we don't have one), and to some extent to delete it or block it (since most UIs are on board with the "decentralized" ethos and don't want to be censors, and again, because it isn't violating a ToS), so we face a fundamentally bigger problem than they do.
The rewards incentive also changes the picture a lot (for the worse in terms of spam), as @onthewayout stated earlier.
Give authors free downvotes on comments on their posts?
Seems plausible.
Sounds like a decent idea and gives the author a little more sense of control over their own blog.
Is it possible to remove Tax Curve from the posts and leave it as it is on comments? Comments under $20 will be automatically taxed and it will be easy to find comments over $20 (abusers will have to vote during the first window, otherwise they will be taxed by 2nd or 3rd window rules)
I think part of the intent of removing it is to encourage small votes on comments, so this wouldn't be effective for the goal.
In the past, I've seen posts on Steem with 5 cents pending payout value and 10 comments under the post with $15 pending payout each (upvoted on 6th day from publish date). Code should protect us from situation like that.
Alternatively, there are many engagement bots like misterengagement, beer, wine... not a perfect solution to promote engagement but if one of them had a strong token price...
I agree, also within Communities if a community mod notices bot comments they can easily mute that account and preserve UX within that community and I think communities will have the most traffic in the end anyway so I think the damage of spam comments in the grand scheme would be minimal.