I feel like these discussions, while good and healthy, will quickly become largely irrelevant and overall frame Steem in an unsustainable way, leading us to address the wrong problems!
No matter how we incentivize these ROI maximizing whales to curate better or worse, the average user will not notice one bit of difference when Steem is at any sort of reasonable scale.
Let's say in the next few years Steem hits 25 million users. Great, but that still is only a tiny fraction of the bigger players. The Steem blockchain is currently dishing out roughly 25 million Steem a year in rewards. Even if everyone earns identically in a wonderfully balanced and sharing society... we all earn 1 Steem a year. Of course, this won't happen. Serious content creators, businesses, celebrities, etc. will of course outperform and we'll fall into much more of a Pareto distribution. Your average run of the mill Steemian will probably earn .1 to .2 Steem a year. If some misbehaving whales knock that down to .09 or .18 how much will it really matter? Will appreciating Steem price help save the minnow morale? No. Lets say the 25x growth in our user base brings on a 100x multiple in our price and we're at $300 per Steem! Your average user is still making $30-$60 per year. We cannot make rewards for average users our main message and reason for being or Steem will fail.
I grind my teeth as I see the countless posts being bandied about at this early stage, complaining about the seemingly small rewards , as I feel like the amounts anyone is seeing now will seem like a fortune in the months and years to come!
Steem needs to be framed as the incredible tool that it is. A one stop setup for businesses and creators for extremely frictionless and cost effective financial transactions, marketing, social media, crowdfunding, etc. In the end we're going to need people to be here just because they want to be here... not for rewards distribution. And those people will follow the content that they want to see.
I'm also curious to see the evolution and impact of a system like SMTs. New niche specific whales will be created and average users will have much more opportunity of feeling engaged and valued as they earn recognition and rewards in a focused community and area of interest that they really care about.
The ROI maximizing habits we see at this small scale will also cease to be as effective with growth. It really is short sighted both for Steem as a whole, but also directly for the people engaging in it right now. Sure, users may feel like they are maximizing their stake, but the ways they are doing it will lead to them not being able to outperform their own stake. I firmly believe that someone who wields stake wisely to build an active, supportive, organic community around themselves will outperform the ROI of a dedicated self voter or bot delegator any day, and this will become much more apparent the more people we have involved. Accounts focused solely on immediate ROI also tend to comparatively weaken over time, as they are more inclined to power down and cash out some earnings. Their quest for raw ROI already shows they have the mentality of a Steem earner, and not a Steem owner.
In a nutshell, I don't see the current economics as overly limiting or negative. There is no solution for the drastically increasing scarcity of Steem and at full scale the vast majority of Steem users will have relatively low value accounts regardless of the voting behavior of a handful of todays current whales.
Thanks, but I'm puzzled by your response. There's a problem that needs to be fixed now, which is the misalignment of incentives. Whether relevant or not next 5 years, it doesn't matter. Some superintelligent AI might even take over the world tomorrow.
Minnows or whales or giraffes, doesn't matter. What matters is to have an economy that is rewarding desirable behaviour, probably equally as much as the worst, if we're to be pessimistic. Now the gap is in the region of 600-1000% (I'm a normal user that curates, but I'm earning 600-1000% less than if I just sell my votes?)
I actually agree with most of what you have to say, but that's far in the future with the maturity of SMTs and all the skyscrapers that go with it. The goal of having a reliable focus now on the proven model of social media is the most beneficial move. Steemit and other Steem-based platforms could be leveraged, and I think most are underestimating web rankings and what they do for projects like this.
Also, 1 million engaged and satisfied users / investors / whatnot is way better than 25 million users under the current economic circumstances which rewards the most counter-productive behaviours for the network..
I don't think this focus will address the wrong problems. Sure not everybody is gonna get Steemed up, it's just the nature of any social networks. It really doesn't matter if there are a lot of people just earning 60-100 or whatever, the point is to have people actually earning through proof-of-brain, which at least require a form of curation (which is simply not voting for the self because it's the equivalent of no work. but we don't ban self-voting, we just remove the trolley problem so voting however one wants is more or less the same outcome).
Seriously I dunno why you're trying to brush off the issue when there's good evidence and reasoning lol. I think it's an entirely fixable issue at almost no risk, except to bidbotters maybe. So they'll need to shift to something that actually does some work instead of zero work.Regardless, they'll still exist, it's just that buyers would have to take more risk.
Agreed. People will come for the community and discover new things and do new stuff and figure out what Steem is for themselves anyway. But the chances fall off when there's utter looting going around. Also just saw the comment about celebs endorsing. Totally, it'll be the smartest move, especially once this problem gets fixed.
I do understand your point of view, but perhaps I'm just not optimistic on the ability to figure an ultimate ROI formula that incentivizes good behavior. I feel like cultural change and UI improvement is more important going forward.
Maybe I'm just missing how some of these suggested changes even work to properly address the issue at hand. In my mind, most folks who earn via vote selling are doing so by delegating power to a service that then pays them a percentage of their earning in turn. These voting bots are then dominating curation rewards as well, and under an increase in curation % will adjust by passing on more of that profit back to their delegators, thus keeping vote selling in equilibrium with actual curation.
And it doesn't seemingly do anything to address multi account abuses. Any kind of collusive voting ring will see no impact to their activity as it'll just shift which account involved gets the ill gotten gains. Likewise pure self voters remain unaffected as it'll still be more profitable for them to vote themselves as gaining the curation reward and the creation reward is better than just curating.
Maybe my thinking is off on some of these points, so please feel free to correct or hit me with some examples, but overall, I believe that whatever math we do, there'll be follow up math to determine the best way to game the system. Even with changes to make rewards non linear again it'll still be a solvable problem for ROI maximalists resulting in regular users still not getting curated. Voting trails would simply return in force to pile on predetermined posts at the most mathematically beneficial time to maximize rewards. For a small segment of the population, proof of brain will always end at the point the numbers are crunched and the bot is programmed.
All that being said, I don't think it's hopeless to expect changes and better things for Steem. But that kind of gets me back to my thought that some of these discussions may take us off course. For example, I firmly believe the best way to undercut the voting bots is to replace and improve the existing inbuilt promoted & advertising system. A well implemented and working system would give people a choice, and go a long way toward undercutting the profitability of vote selling services and improving content discovery, as well as bringing users a secondary revenue stream that would actually be valued based on their genuine audience size & engagement, rather than the amount of Steem Power they currently hold.
Perhaps I favor a more bottom up approach, rather than top down. I'm kind of working off the assumption that the "power users" are going to find ultimate ROI at the expense of the spirit of proof of brain no matter what. On the flip side, the vast majority of average users don't even fully grasp the mechanics of the rewards system as is, but they're the mass consumer feeding the vote buying industry because they see no alternative. They're the ones whose behavior can most be changed to improve the platform. Peer to peer advertising programs, public education about the importance of powering up and exercising your votes, and perhaps on the technical side continuing to look at the problem of the "dust threshold" taking away voting power of the smaller users. I just find things like this as being more important and productive than trying to calculate a new rewards formula that will maybe improve the voting patterns of a couple dozen individuals.
that's like saying we would literally push our nose up Zuckerburg's face same way Spiegel did with Snapchat. if that is so then a hell lot of work will be inputed into this platform. off the top of my head, i think the fastest way to achieve this is by luring CELEBRITIES of all walks of life away but most especially those from the entertainment industry.
is there really any other way of triggering up such mass adoption?
does history have any record of mass adoption that didnt end up through the Entertainment industry?
I see that as the most probable path too. I get excited whenever I see someone I recognize has joined the platform. There’s a growing core of actors, musicians, writers, directors & artists that I hope are poised to build more serious momentum.
But I think once communities and a bit more polish to usability (and of course registration) are added, there is an unbeatable value proposition. Right now people come to Steem and alter their behavior to chase rewards. I think soon the available tools and projects built on Steem will make it easier for people to cross over and continue doing exactly what they’re doing. And if SMTs perform well and development grows easier, the end result is people won’t even have to cross over because Steem will come to them. As an artist, I fantasize about a scenario where a site like DeviantArt integrates a Steem backend. Totally doable as a project like BeScouted has already demonstrated. I would jump for joy as 26 million new artists were suddenly on the blockchain. Scenarios like that can feasibly penetrate across every category of online community that exists now.