How do you feel removing the claim rewards mechanism ?

in #hive4 years ago (edited)

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Hello !

Recently I've been thinking of quick wins for hive, basically what small steps can we take to improve it. I've been on steem/hive for almost 3 years now and there's one thing that I never really liked was being forced to claim rewards, it feels like a chore, and if you don't do it, regularly you won't have as much hive power when voting and thus you are losing out and potential curation rewards.

I think one of the very first scripts I wrote on steem was an auto reward claimer because I didn't want to do it manually anymore (https://github.com/drov0/Steem-reward-manager, still exists, and it's been updated for hive :))

And when asking around I realized that basically almost no one claims their tokens manually for the reasons stated above, it's cool the first 5 times but it quickly gets annoying.

So I asked around to some of the people who were there when it was implemented (@abit, @blocktrades and @vandeberg) to know why it was done that way instead of sending the tokens directly to accounts.

Basically it was done like this because of a feature that never came to be, multi-chain fabric, and for the added gamification (it feels much more significant to claim once per week 50 hive rather than receive 0.5 hive every 2-3 hours).

So apart from gamification, there are no real reasons for it to stay that way. And I think it would be much more clean if we had tokens sent directly to our accounts upon payout. I made an issue and gathered some thoughts on the steps that would be needed to implement such a feature : https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hive/issues/24

Basically I view this as being done in two separate hard forks:

  • First a hardfork to create the tokens directly instead of asking users to claim, over time the number of accounts with pending rewards will drop significantly.
  • Then a second hardfork to force those last accounts to claim rewards via a hard fork and disable/remove the claim_reward op, although that one may be optional, there is nothing really wrong with leaving the claim op there and have those people claim their last "claimeable" tokens whenever they feel like it.

erratum: Actually having thought about this a bit more, I think leaving the claim_op and leaving those last accounts with pending rewards alone is the better move. So we should be doing it in one hard fork.

And to be precise, it would not be a hard for FOR this feature, it's more of a "let's include this in a hard fork among other changes"

I don't think it would be too hard of a change to implement and I will probably get on it in the following week once my work on RC delegation pools is done.

So I'd like to get some feedback from the community first, would you like to see this change implemented ? Why ? Why not ?

And while I'm at it, if you have some "quick wins" ideas (no, shipping smts is not a quick win) I would love to hear about them

Disclaimer:
THIS DOESNT MEAN THIS WILL GET INCLUDED IN HIVE AT ALL, me working on it is not a guarantee of it, ultimately it will come down to whether this feature is wanted or not.

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Nope, its a waste of development time IMO. Some people claim their rewards on a specific cadence to help them with any relevant taxation obligations in whatever jurisdiction they reside. Automating this (effectively) makes reconciliation for those people infinitely more difficult than what it already is with fluctuations between fiat / crypto and daily close rates.

Just my opinion. If tax computations is the problem, there should be an option for some people (who don't pay those types of taxes) to automatically claim their rewards, and others (who pay said taxes) could choose to manually claim their rewards with a longer deadline (or no deadline at all, if possible).

While I agree with your statement, I will also highlight that these same people overlook the steem and now hive that they earn from holding staked steem/hive so it isn’t even like you could be completely honest in tracking this in the first place.

Yep, there's ways to track that as well, but there's no easy way to do it in your region's FIAT currency.

I doubt many here report any obligations anyhow, so it might be a moot point.

Bingo. Your post is one of many reasons why I hate Steem/Hive. Developers don't stop and consider the why at all. This developers just thinks something is "dumb" and never considers tax complexity. The original idea was brilliant.

Why focus on something hard - that returns value to all members of the community - instead of doing something easy that can be another bullet point on a change log? :)

I don't think that is a good enough reason not to do it.

Besides your holdings on steemit and hive grow daily with the inflation of holdings so you're going to be marking income (reinvested income) versus a dollar price for every day of the year anyway and it's not the same amount each day which if you're tracking you're going to have to dump this information from the Blockchains to excel and compare to a price for that day anyway. What real difference will adding curation and author rewards to that export make? I don't think it would be significantly more work but that is my opinion.

Easily reconciled if you take the difference in your "redeemed" rewards from phase to phase, and factor in the median price over the days between the claiming of rewards, when you do it.

Still tough to do, but doable. Gets even more complicated when exchanging or converting HBD for HIVE on the internal market.

I thought that we need to claim tokens because of some legal purposes. I can't recall exactly but in the early days, when they implemented this feature steemit.inc explained it like they can't just give us rewards. We need to claim them by ourselves.

That's a very interesting point to make and an important one at that. We wouldn't want to all of us all of a sudden have to pay a fine to the government or something just because we're not manually claiming tokens anymore. Or Hive be taken down because of such a change.

There is also an other thing to care about. How we can trust where those autoclaimed hive will go. At least when we claim we can monitor the amount that we should claim. But, when it will be claimed automatically we will forget to check that.

That's true. When we claim, we check that it's received, that it shows up in the wallet and in thememo for the wallet. If it's automatic, and we don'T check for a while, how do we check. So far, the wallet only shows so much history, and even if we use other dapps to check, it's more of a hassle.

Who's going to take hive down and how possible is that?

Some Justin Sun wannabe.

What he said! :D

It also works for taxes. Rewards auto-sent to a wallet every week is a taxable event, whereas "claim rewards" gives users a little more control in deciding when to realize their tokens.

Yet we all earn steem/hive from just holding staked steem/hive and that is just given to us so their argument doesn’t seem to hold a lot of water. Same holds true for witness rewards.

Sounds like a good idea. Perhaps this feature could be offered as an opt-in.

The different front ends like peakd and busy could implement an auto claim option; so it would not have to be on the back end.

PS: I really liked the idea of rewards going straight into the wallet on reading the post. IMHO, the claim rewards action is white noise on the blockchain.

I changed my mind on reading the comments. Right now I claim the reward and power up every time I visit my wallet. This is because my primary focus is on increasing my vote power. If I were powering down or holding, I might want to let the rewards accumulate in a raw state before claiming them.

Two hardforks seems a bit extreme. Claiming rewards never bothered me. I'm one of those weirdos who does everything manually. I don't consider voting or claiming rewards (pushing buttons) to be work. It wouldn't bother me if claiming was automatic either. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Two hardforks could potentially break something, then you'd actually have a reason to fix something. At the end of the day though, who gives a crap what I have to say, you folks will do whatever you want anyway... LOL!

"I'm one of those weirdos who does everything manually."

I'm one of those weirdos too! Thanks for bringing this perspective to the discussion so eloquently.

Yea me to. Didnt even know it was automated! I think many others have no idea either.

You and every other teenage boy on the blockchain.

I didn't mean "we will do two hard forks specifically for that" it's more like "we will piggy back on the next two hard forks"

On a side note, I have to say I appreciate you're asking the community before going ahead and changing something. High five for that.

I'd still prefer to see internal memos, brief recent development news, and platform politics have a home, so those producing actual content are not forced to compete with posts like these. I had suggested a community and a tag that would remove these kinds of posts from the trending page and place them on a separate page meant for the happenings behind the scenes, then creating a culture early on that encourages people to visit that section to remain informed, then the content producers have an actual platform designed to attract outside eyes and even internal eyes on their work. I do hope, someday, someone takes this suggestion seriously.

I'm 💯 with you on this. I sometimes feel only dev posts and posts relating to crypto generally dominate the trending page. I was hoping something will be done differently on hive. We need to find a way to bring real content creators to the blockchain. We need a medium-esque trending page.

All the content is equally important, it simply doesn't mix well. The internal announcements get buried by arts/entertainment/information. The arts/entertainment/information gets buried by the internal announcements. This isn't working. Some people are going without being informed of important decisions and others feel there's nothing entertaining here to consume. Separating these two elements would benefit all involved. I'd prefer to have a trending page for arts/entertainment/information etc. and another tab for 'Recent Developments'. Both sections would work the same way, except then we're not sifting through a pile of clutter.

I thought so. And when more changes are included in a hardfork, there's more chance of something breaking. We're all aware of the risks. Many also know downtime doesn't last forever, since so many are involved and available to fix these things in a timely manner, so that's good; the effort is appreciated.

Again, in the end, it really doesn't matter to me. I'm fine either way. Of course there might be other features added or taken away in a hardfork that might not sit well with me, and due to that fact, the changes I'm fine with might force me to agree to changes I'm not okay with. So if I wanted something fixed or added, and the removal of these features are included, I guess it doesn't matter what I say about these features, since they'd be hitching a ride on progress anyway. Hardforks are hard... LOL!

Same. I get a thrill from hitting that claim rewards button and that hasn't changed in 3 years.

Out of curiosity, why couldn't there be a "claim rewards automatically" checkbox

This could be implemented two ways:

At a front end level: then the front end needs your posting key/posting authority which is meh in terms of security. And this is what's happening these days with auto claimer tools here an there.

At the blockchain level, it could be done but it's extra complexity and I don't feel like it's worth that complexity. (need to add a field to an account and a new operation to activate/deactivate auto-claiming, plus handle both flows.)

Hive Vote, previously Steem Auto has been doing this for a while, the service is great.

I just discovered this service and now need more Hive Power to Justify using it.

I am so used to claiming rewards that it doesn't make a difference but it does make me feel like my accoount is growing every time I do it (once per day). A dashboard of earnings at the UI level would be more effective in gamifing the experience.

As for the other reason for the implementation of the feature to claim rewards i.e. the fabric I think that we should revisit it. Altough Hive is one of the most scalable blockchains with it's current implementation I don't think that it would be able to have the level of adoption needed to have a global impact and still be functional without a change in it's arquitecture like the one envisioned with the Fabric...we need think big and not settle to being a niche project.

This is again not the whole story.

Please first tell us, how much are there sitting in total in all reward balances that are not claimed for a longer period? Accounts that are dead, and have a rewards balance will be powered up in an instance.

For VESTS holders, a large amount rewards being claimed does make their value decrease. So, are you sure, you want these side-effects?

That's an interesting point

I think manually more interesting it gives an additional reason to connect . and for investors it facilitates their calculation of gains. I think the most important thing is to change the economy hive and bring more people in hive.

we make hive an investment and hbd les récompense
we have to add hbd power and be a real stablecoin. to explain my point of view and make it easier to calculate suppose hive its value is 1 hive = 1 dollar and 1 hbd = 1 dollar .
I start with the publication awards :
it's the same thing 50% author 50% conservative
or can change it to 75% author
because the Conservative would have other way to earn more.
more explanation in investor.
the rewards will only be with stablecoin hbd.
investor hive :
the more you buy "hive" the more you earn "hbd power" which will be used only for the vote, example : you have 1000 hive power it pays you 2 hbd power every day ""the calculation will be on the value of hive"".
2 hbd power you can only use them to recompose the authors.
and when a curator votes 50% conservative in hbd "hbd liquid" who can use as he wants,
so we can encourage investors to stay in hive power, and encourage investors to invest in new business or application.
abstract :
hive power makes you win hbd power everyday.
hive power you can lend is win hive and hbd.
hbd power for voting only
hbd and hive for trade
the authors earn hbd who can sell it or invest it.

As a mandatory thing where the user has no choice I would say no to auto claim. If it was presented as an option, as a choice like the 100% power up or 50/50 choice I would agree with it. I have only been on steem/hive for a little over two and a half years, I still like claiming my rewards. I think a lot of the new users in the morning or when they first log into the chain like looking to see if anyone found their post, or what they earned.

The only people I can see the auto claim function really benefiting are those with a lot of accounts and that are still claiming via a manual operation and have not self automated the process or used someone else's script/bot to do it.


On other changes I personally would like to see in future Hard Forks:

A change to the witness selection/retention system, to where a vote is not a lifetime of account vote and that it decays and needs to be manually re-voted every now and then, every 12 to 18 months as a minimum. I understand some people feel this is a waste of time, and is easily worked around. I would also like to see that when a (dead)witness is no longer running a node that all votes to that account be removed. Plus a few other changes, but those are the two points of witness system I would like to see changed.


The other issue I would like to see being worked on in one of the upcoming hard Forks would be that of the down vote system.

A down vote system is needed, I do not care how people want to view it but a down vote even for the right reasons is a negative action. Most societies around the world require people to answer for their negative behavior, and negative behavior does come with consequences.

When a down vote is cast I would like to see a pop-up box like on the old steemit that gives the valid reasons, (as determined by the community), next to those valid reason would be a check box and one box would have to be selected, an auto comment will be placed on the post down voted under the down voters account name. Then the community can decide if the down vote was justified by down voting the down voter if so desired.

If it was possible and the down vote was for excessive reward I would like to see the highest name mentioned in the auto down vote. Example: @blahblahblah: This user down voted your post due to excessive reward vote from @bigvotevotesbig.

That's pretty much the changes I would like to see considered at some point in the future.

You're right we should be more aware of cryptopolitics. Seems like the plutocratic system is resurging with its whale circle vote jerking

@mahdiyari I guess $75 worth of votes for Hive Users dont know why they should give you a witness vote.

Hive Vote

What? I can't understand what you mean

No one in this thread, is aware of the feature Hive Vote has to automatically claim rewards every 2 hr.

Well, if you really want to tackle this topic then I will leave you an additional idea to keep you thinking:

Give users the opportunity to schedule their rewards claim. Establish a collection period: weekly, daily, monthly ...

In case the user decides to use long periods, an interest rate could be applied, which could motivate the users to leave their rewards in the rewards pool so that they are redirected.
These sheltered tokens would serve as a passive investment and perhaps a dynamic ninja stake could be created for blockchain development.

Think about this.

Yes, I would like to see this change implemented because there is no reason to do it manually!

Great to see people putting forward ideas to make HIVE simpler and smoother.

I LIKE manually getting my rewards!! I feel power and purpose. LOL... Please leave it the way it is!!

The BIG issues to take Hive forward?

FIX the downvote disaster
Make onboarding MUCH easier
Mentoring for newbies
Promotion across other social media.

But totally appreciating others may differ. LOVE the decentralized world where people can STEP UP. Awesome.

It makes no sense to manually claim rewards.

You must be an investor then and not a user. I see myself as a normal everyday user not here 100% for the cash only. If people did not give a crap about the rewards, they would not be so pissed off by the down voters.

People like seeing the feedback, seeing their account grow. The motivation to produce or to vote and consume more. There are a lot of reason to leave the manual claim in place. If it can not be done as an option, then it should not be changed after all the claim reward system is not broken, and it does provide a motivation factor in some cases.

If you look at my account you would probably not classify me as investor ;)

The extra step to manualy claim rewards always felt a little pointless to me.

Autoclaim can be easily set up with a little bit of code. I don't see why we should keep this feature from regular users but reserve it for somebody who can deploy a bit of Python on a server, Heroku instance or Raspberry Pi.

What are a few reasons in favour to keeping manual claim?

So you would force the auto claim function on people? A choice would be better. Also the claim rewards system is not broken, it works, and there are options available to auto claim rewards if a person so Chooses.

What are a few reasons in favour to keeping manual claim?:

  • Reason 1>It is not broken! The claim rewards works.
  • Reason 2>If a person finds it burdensome, all they have to do is claim it once a week, once a month or once a year. The rewards are going nowhere.
  • Reason 3>If they are only claiming to power up, then they can set their rewards to 100%.
  • Reason 4>If they want to make a withdrawal they need to go to the wallet and then prior to making the withdrawal they can claim the rewards they have been saving.

The Claim Rewards system is not broken so why does it need to be fixed? Instead of talking about this that is not broken people should be putting more effort in protecting the chain from broken systems, such as the Witness selection/retention system. Now that is broken, and does need to be fixed. And saying it can't happen here is total and complete bullshit because it happened once, it can happen again. it was the week link in the steem chain, and it is a week link in the Hive chain.

So what is broken about the claim rewards system? Nothing other than annoyance. A bigger annoyance and a bigger reason for people leaving Steem and Hive is the down vote system, that is broken also. So if we are going to fix annoyances then the down vote system certainly ranks a little bit higher than Oh crap, I need to claim my rewards again!!! annoyance.

I second that!

Good point!

I would like to have the increased balance visible somehow. Maybe a graph in the wallet. Otherwise people might hardly notice they're getting paid. But that's up to wallet builders and won't require a hardfork.

PeakD, under tools.

I quite like claiming manually, but I'd hardly throw my toys out the pram if we moved to an auto claim mechanism!

That would be great but if we need two hardforks then, unfortunately, we will not see this feature active on the blockchain for a long time.

Oh it would be effective after the first hard fork, the second hard fork is more of a cleanup one and may not even be needed.

Same here!

I'm all for it!

I think the rewars should go directly to the accounts.

YES! I wish this was implemented for SE tribes when it first started. Claiming tribes tokens everyday got annoying really fast since there were so many of them.

I do my self see that claim reward button could help people figure out their taxes, as atleast in Finland one has to pay taxes for income based on the moment (up to 1 day intervals) one receives the income to their possession. With claim button it is possible to do it monthly or even yearly rather than keeping daily track.

I myself will propably just rent my steem-power eventually though so can't say if it is necessary.

I like the idea of the autoclaimer, as I understood it, it's to save block space to only claim when you are ready.

This is a hard one :) I certainly get the gamification element as people really like to get rewards - so we want to make sure they see it by allowing them to claim the rewards manually.

On the other hand hand yep, it's tedious but my vote would go to allowing users to auto-claim on the frontend level (wallet.hive.blog).

Alternatively, if we would remove claiming rewards, I would suggest giving the the "rewards received info" text (in the wallet history) different color / style to emphasize that this is something special / cool :)

On the flip side, it sucks to spend 10 hours on a post and then 7 days later claim your 0.001 Hive. It is like an extra, unnecessary slap in the face for new people. Might as well automate a sarcastic memo on the claim that says "Don't spend it all at one place" haha 😆 🤣

I don’t really think this is a big issue to be honest. Those of us that can’t afford to drop lots of money like me enjoy seeing my account grow. It hasn’t bothered me at all to claim it. If I wanted to automatically claim I would use the auto service by hive vote.

Seeing the rewards I’m gaining helps keep me inspired in some ways to be out there curating and posting and commenting.

I already got tired claiming my rewards, so now I have enabled automatic claiming.

I feel like it is useless, serves no real purpose at the moment. Why bother claiming every single curation reward, for example, the same applies to author rewards for sure.

I definitely support removing it, there is absolutely no need for it to be there. Though the removal process should be handled carefully as there are probably thousands of unclaimed VESTs sitting somewhere in the chain.

It feels nice to hit claim reward and see the numbers go up tho.

I actually get a thrill every time I hit the Claim Rewards button. I've been on Steem/Hive for 3 years as well, and I just love hitting the claim button. Even if it's just a small amount, I enjoy it. I like seeing the amount I'm about to receive and I know which post it's from since I post every day, usually once a day. It also allows me to see how much Steem/Hive I have accumulated, in relation to the SP/HP I have and all that.

Perhaps this can be something that can be optional, if implemented. Don't force everyone to have automatic reward claims, have it be an option. That way, those who want it done automatically, can do that, and those of us who enjoy claiming manually, can continue to do that as well.

If anyone can think of any reason (other than "fun" or "gamification") to keep this feature, please let me know, I've been trying to think of one myself but can't. Unless thee's some reason to keep it that I haven't thought of, I'm in favour of just auto-depositing payouts. There should be a notification, and an entry in the wallet, but that's about it.
EDIT: At the very least, make it an option (setting). If you don't want to have to click the button each time, you shouldn't have to, and you shouldn't be required to use a 3rd party service to make that happen.

Hey @howo, It would be great if you could also run a poll on @dpoll for a simple YES or NO. That will give you a clear idea about how many people support this change or not!!!

Btw, I am up for this change. I anyways use automatic reward claiming feature.

how it work, i am not getting any option

I see it as a non-issue that should be put far off the back-burner,
Thanks thinking it through.

Now what is this multi-chain fabric that we're missing out on?

It should be made automatic to save some little time in claiming.

I completly agree with the autoclaim rewards!!! is annoying to do it manully and i have hive.auto do it for me imagine with SMT if you have different tokens claiming one by one how annoying!

It's about the dopamine factor. Like logging in and seeing the little red to that there are notifications. Claiming rewards is better for the user experience. There are already ways to auto claim if you want to. I say don't fix it if it ain't broke.

I like the idea of automatic claims but it should be done once a day, it should not be done every hour or so.

why not ?

I can think of one reason, where I want to see my transfers page a little neat. If automatic claims happen every time I have a claim, the data would be overwhelming. I know people write scripts to claim automatically every hour, but I try to claim once a day.

I totally back this change! There is no real reason to keep claiming rewards rly:) we might as well automatize it for every1...

I want to claim my rewards. I like the sense of control and entitlement i get from it.

What you should change is the notification system. If a notification is clicked, it should automatically mark as read. :)

Please, get rid of it!

no. a like to do it. feels like am doing something correct every time a clam it. a think its very few users feel its a problem maby just the big big one. where it matters. but be real you are not missing anything if you get just a few 0.05 on your posts like most of us do.

I think it's a good suggestion as long as its going to be an additional feature in a hard fork. I don't think it's worth forking the chain for on its own though. Most people are indifferent about claiming manually or automatically

I actually like to claim rewards manually and I do it once a day. I can see how much there is. And it is not a pain in the behind for me (I must be one of not many).

Maybe just adding an option to choose if we want to manually claim, or have the rewards be auto claimed?

I'd say don't remove it.

Its not something that is super important to me. It doesnt take long to click the claim rewards button once or twice a day. Should be making changed that will actually make it easier and bring new users to Hive/STeem. Although I wouldnt complain about this I see more pressing issues.

new user here, what exactly are stakes and claims and how do i send hive to my metamask? how do i claim on taxes next year? thanks lmao

I would like Automatic direct to your HIVE Tradeable tokens that may be transferred anywhere at anytime. It ios better like that. Then its up to you if you like to POWER UP or WITHDRAW...

I'd agree it is a good time to do this of it doesn't take significant amounts of work and resources