Ok, people. I've seen some folks around these here parts saying bad things about bid bots and also some posts recently dumping on linear rewards. I've had mixed feelings about HF19. You may recall I launched a few posts into trending mentioning "clusterfuck" and "circle-jerk" a week prior to launch (I was admittedly a little late to that party).
Linear Rewards
Here's my take on why distribution is still a little fucked. A eon ago in cryptoland or approximately 2 years for normies Dan and Ned launched Steemit.com and the Steem blockchain. When they did this Dan looked at legislation surrounding ICOs and said "You know... it actually seems like if we do this the wrong way we'll create and unregistered and unliscend security. We can either register it and do this that way or we can get around those requirements by working within the law a different way and simply starting from scratch and mining from zero point while not promising any equity returns so it doesn't look like a security." Faced with that decision they opted out of registering Steem and choose to mine from the start.
Now, they were excited to own and manage a big blockchain company so they didn't make it super easy for everyone to mine. They put it out there how to do and then didn't offer extensive help. That's because they didn't' want a lot of mining competition. It was fair. Anyone could mine it, but it was also unfair because it wasn't obvious how to setup the miner. Dan helped some folks out that were devs or pretty close, but otherwise you either knew how or you didn't.
Getting started
Immediately people started complaining both because of a restart with a glitch and later because Steem was spending more money mining than everyone else. As a result they accumulated 75|% of the steem at one point. Most of the rest went to a handful of people who enough dev knowledge to setup a miner, and later they shut off mining as an option.
Then they followed through on a shitty plan where they did stake weighted inflation. That means the people that already had steem received the new steem. It's like staking coins, but Steem already had a shit distribution and this made it worse because the haves became the mega wahles and the have-nots became plankton. It also tanked the price of Steem. The value of your holdings didn't change much, but post rewards were basically nothing.
Back in my day Steem was seven cents each and it took me 5 posts to make 0.07 Steem from them!
So, that created a really shitty distribution on the platform, but the challenge didn't end there. We also had this thing called exponential rewards. Basically when figuring out post rewards you took your stake and squared it. This took the broken distribution on the chain and made it "exponentially" worse.
Example
Minnow with 5 SP votes full power- rewards shares ~ 25
Dolphin with 5,000 SP votes full power - rewards share ~25,000,000
Whale with 50,000 SP votes full power- rewards share ~ 2,500,000,000
Get the picture? That minnow ain't shit.
Why have exponential rewards? Mostly because of abuse. The point is to find consensus on what a good post is. Generally, the assumption under exponential rewards is that good content will be liked by lots of people so a post with very few people supporting it ain't worth much even with a large vote at the start, but posts with lots of likes end up being worth a ton.
So, in this version you have a few people that are making a killing on Steem because the whales like them and also because of how curation could be gamed. You needed to find an author that was likely to be voted high and trending, get on early, and try to ride exponential curation rewards up. It made it so autovoters became prominant as people gamed the system to upvote the trenders early to catch curation. This made it so that fewer and fewer people got more and more rewards as everyone piled in.
So, that was sorta broken
Ok, to be clear, I think exponential rewards is best, but it's horrible with our current distribution. Something like 93% of the Steem is in the top 100 accounts. You square the influence of the top holders and it gets worse. There were experiments done to try to combat this like limiting how much whales could vote or else they'd get flagged, but ultimately that wasn't cool either as it generally discouraged holding a lot of Steem.
Backdoor hack
I think the impotus for linear rewards was really trying to work around the distribution that was created. By switching to linear it did actually give the minnow accounts a lot more say on the platform. It's still miniscule compared to a whale, but it's roughly an order of magnitude more than what it was before. I remember when my vote became worth 2 cents. It was a giant deal and it took me months on the platform. You ungrateful bastards don't know how good you have (read that in a grumpy old man voice please).
So, they switched to linear rewards and it fixed everything... or not quite
I tracked how rewards started changing right after the change. The most shocking piece was that way more votes were going into comment rewards. Now, I'd love to say this had to do with people getting genuinely interested in other people's posts, but the honest truth is that people started self voting in comments. You couldn't do that before. It wasn't worth shit... even for a mega whale. That's not a challenge now, so you can get massive votes in comments and the value of the comments collectively roughly tripled.
What's the point. We have a lot more self voting. it's now profitable. Generally speaking this is highly frowned upon behavior. I call it autovoterotic. You're getting yourself off with your votes. Am I talking about all votes? No. I tend to vote for my own posts frequently. I wrote something I think it's worth giving myself 1-2 dollars for it. But not my "hey this art is lovely." Especially when we first got going with the change I was watching people dump $100 upvotes in their own comments frequently.
What about Bid bots?
Bid bots weren't prevalent during exponential voting. They are on golos and apparently had a financial impact there, but exponential rewards woudln't make it profitable unless your post was already doing well.
What about vote selling? It was fucking rampant! Vote swapping and vote selling was happening all the time, but it just wasn't a transparent activity that anyone could engage in. You had to be wealthy and connected to even get a shot at it. It wasn't an accident that the same 10-20 people were always in trending.
So, now we have bid bots. Yes, people can buy their way into trending. I like to think I actually pioneered it. While it's not perfectly egalitarian because now you need money to get into trending it's certainly better than it used to be when it was the same faces every time. Now anyone with cash can get into trending and anyone with money can buy a vote; not just the limited few.
I think that's an improvement. I also kinda dig aspects of linear rewards. You like Utopian? Me too. It only operates as it does because of linear rewards. Same with minnowsupport. We couldnt' offer votes to everyone on the platform because they would be worth literally nothing instead of something small.
I do think the vote weight distribution is better under linear rewards too.
Fixes I'd suggest
This thing isn't perfect. Here are some ways I'd suggest making it better. Some of these have bene floated around before. Some I feel like i'm just shouting to myself over and over.
- Have a separate pool for downvoting and have an option to not hurt reputation. Essentially offer 3 votes
upvote
downvote
flag
Upvote gives rewards
downvote removes rewards
flag removes rewards and hurts reputation
The one number on the platform that really helps determine how much you earn around here (outside of SP) is rep. If you're looking to earn through blogging you're gonna need a high rep. Downvotes that adjust rep have a lasting impact. So, not only are you saying with your flag "I don't like this content" you automatically say "and I hope you don't earn shit here motherfucker" because you effect their long term ability to earn.
It would be better to have a non rep altering flag so you can disagree with a reward without impacting them indefinately.
It would also be good for this to have a separate pool because right now if yhou flag you get no curation reward. That's bad. You're asking whales to give up money which they have the right to earn through their investment to clean up the community. If flagging didn't cost them anything I think it would be more likely and especially if it didn't hurt rep I think it would be used a lot more to actually level set content on the blockchain. With the stakes a little lower maybe that would reduce revenge flagging too.
- Stake weighted inflation
The worst decision made was when they set the infation to 100% or more and did it all through stake weighted distribution. It was fucking terrible to watch. Rich people got way more steem. Post rewards went way down. Steem price tanked. it sucked. The stake weighted inflation went way down, but it's still there. It's currently set at 15% and has an effective rate a little lower than that. Since Steemit and the exchanges hold a fat percentage of Steem we're giving them an assload more.
260M steem. 9% inflation. that's 23.4M steem. 15% goes to stake weighted inflation. That's roughly 3.51M steem. Something like 60% of that goes to three entities for 2.1M steem. That's roughly $6M dollars right now and potentially a lot more. This seems like a waste to me.
It would take a hardfork to change, but the code should be really fucking simple to execute. In the code change the setting from 15% to 0% for the stake weighted inflation out of overall platform inflation.
What would happen then? That 3.5M steem would be distributed mostly to post authors and curators with a smidge going to witnesses. I'd even be down to shrink witness percent a little to make sure they/we dont' get any additional benefit from this. Ultimately I think that 3.5M steem is better off in the hands of active users than primarily in the wallets of just Steem and the exchanges.
- Overall platform inflation
I think we should set this to 10% and leave it there. It's currently at 9% and set to shrink by half a percent every 6 months for the next 20 years or so. As that happens the amount of steem distributed will go up for a little bit, and then start shrinking. There will be less and less distributed through posting. I think that's bad. I think it will discourage signups, and I think signups drive growth.
General conclusions
Looks. Shit's working! Price is going up, people are signing up, active users are increasing. Life is good. We have some amazing hard forks coming down at us. I think those are going to drive price which will in turn drive users which will later drive price. I think we're in for a great year.
That said, linear rewards is prone to abuse and could use more downvotes for price discovery on content.
Bit bots aren't the devil and going back to exponential rewards while we still have a terrible distribution will make things go from ok to bad.
It could use less stake weighted inflation to Steemit and teh exchanges.
it could use a slight tweak up for platform inflation and let it stay there.
I know some very smart people that don't like some or all of these plans I've listed and who knows how much of this would or can happen. It might be that Steemit's other priorities keeps them from happening regardless of what the platform and witnesses think at least for the next year or so. That's ok, I happen to think they're working on a good list of priorities right now and the platform is experiencing healthy growth even though btc and Steem have been correcting pretty hard.
$0.02,
hope the background helps some frustrated folks on the chain
Wow! I didn't know anything about the STeemit history & I've been wondering how (and why) it was set up. It seems there's room for much improvement and if Steemit is to survive and not get superceded by a better platform, then it will need to make everything far more equitable. That being said, it's still a million times better than those corporate assholes FB etc.
This lays the history and structure out more clearly for me to understand. Thanks, mate.
One fun-fact. I had a friend that was actually using one of the few "bid-bots" that existed before n^2 turned to linear rewards. He was actually getting more from the bid-bot prior to the change to linear. Once the rewards curve got switched to linear, the amount that the votes from the same bid-bot paid out were actually less.
That doesn't prove much of anything. Given a bit more time and maybe that bot would have been smash by a whale and such bit-bot would have become so prevalent.
I've already highlighted many times why n^2 is fundamentally a better system than linear reward but I plan on eventually dedicating a full post to it.
Cheers Tim!
The bid bot was a whale, which is why the votes were worth more under n^2.
The n^2 system is significantly better than linear when there is a reasonable distribution of tokens, and a large number of upvotes is an indication of popularity from multiple users. If we didn’t have the distribution we have - I would be right along side you fighting for n^2. In fact, we would have never switched away from it in the first place. When you have single users that have more weight than thousands of other users combined though - squaring their massive influence does not work. The n^2 curve gives a significant and unreasonable advantage to the largest stakeholders, and drowns out the small amount of influence that the lesser stakeholders have. It does not work with the distribution we have with STEEM, unless the top stakeholders opt-out of voting.
The root problem is really distribution - significantly more than any rewards curve we choose. Given the distribution we have, linear (even with the issues that come with it) is the lesser of two evils.
P.S. SMTs are going to support linear or n^2 rewards curves - so some of the new token economies will be able to get it right.
Glad to know that!
I hope we can get to some understanding.
Giving away free Steem is devaluating the whole platform.
How is giving away free Steem better than letting stakeholders sell their Steem to market price?
There are people ready to buy those Steem, how does giving them away make them anything else than less valuable?
I didn't make that quote, and I don't really think it is important. If you take that quote away, the math behind linear vs n^2 still remains the same.
So the distribution is bad, making Steem less valuable than it could potentially be, so the solution is to give away free Steem up until the distribution gets better? Then revert back to n^2?
How is this making Steem more valuable?
How is making Steem less valuable through devaluating its value through giving away part of its inflation more valuable?
If the stakeholders consider they own a too much Steem, should the logic be that they should sell their Steem rather than the rule being changed to undeniably give an advantage to scammers?
Are you recommending investors to solely vote themselves while we revert back to a system that is sound?
Are you recommending people like @haejin to have their own bit-bot where they will be making as much or more than if they voted themselves 100% all the time while being left alone?
Edit:
Sorry about that somewhat incendiary comment. I know we're all trying to make Steem better. The fact my comment highlighted stand. Scammers are at an advantage under the current incentives and that is at the expanse of everyone as a whole.
Giving away free STEEM is a mischaracterization. The same amount of STEEM is going to be given out regardless of which voting curve we use. Who it is given out to is the only thing that will change, and the voting curve decides who has influence over that.
If you think @haejin is a reason to switch from linear to n^2 then you are mistaken about what the difference between linear and n^2 does. @haejin with the amount of stake he has is a very wealthy whale, and his votes would actually be worth more if we switched to n^2.
No worries. Passionate debates come with the territory :)
I agree, although I believe the growth of the platform, in terms of users and price will eventually deliver similar outcomes.
I shot a video a week ago, explaining the differences for newcomers.
Yeah, that can happen if you use a bid bot on a trending post. It wouldn't work for a minnow just trying to get noticed with a bid on a mostly unread post. I'm assuming your friend was already doing ok on the platform? Or is there a scenario I missed?
Bid bots get a lot of hate. The back room vote swapping and selling would be so much worse.
No. This was a minnow.
From @aggroed explaination I understand he must have bid very high.
Funny you point this out, in a way linear rewars makes high bids less "abusive"
@aggroed another great post breaking this all down. I agree with all your suggestions, we are in this for the long haul and mass adoption should be the goal. I see lots of people leaving because not only is this platform confusing as fuck. Most new people see no point when they are barely seeing any returns. The future is bright AF here! I hope that in HF20 we can implement some of these suggestions.
Wow you litterly explained everything what happened in the history of steem. And change my view on voting bots. I've never thought about why the hell bid bots existed in the first place and why some people could mine in the past and not everyone.
Guess this has to be to do with a great formula of distribution of steem in the long run.
Thanks for the post about the history on Steemit aggroed, very useful for folks that were not around since the start.
The main issue for me when it comes down to bid bots is that they pretty much do 100% self voting since it's by far the most profitable. The support from whales to mainly dolphins by upvotes has dropped a lot which forces dolphins to sell their own votes to buy the upvotes they used to get for free from whales. This decreases their own voting power which lowers the support they can give to minnows.
Mainly curation has totally been broken ever since the steem dollars went above 1$, this really needs to be fixed because there is no incentive at all for bigger accounts to properly curate content right now.
It would be nice to see devs delegate some Steem Power to initiatives like @minnowsupport or @quartor that support a lot of the smaller content creators.
Also when looking at if from a relative earnings point of view (earnings compared to your own Steem Power) smaller accounts actually crush the bigger ones.
I'm really looking forward what this platform will bring with the next hardfork.
"Also when looking at if from a relative earnings point of view (earnings compared to your own Steem Power) smaller accounts actually crush the bigger ones."
I think that is the whole point in making the distribution more equal. In that view I think this is a "temporary" meassure to try to fix this distribution.
I hope when we have more users on this platform buying steem that the distribution will get better or that the big stake holders already have too much...
Good point!
We'll agree to disagree on this one for the time being and hopefully at some point one of us will change its stance and we'll find agreement again.
I've highlighted why linear reward is an inferior system to n^2 curve in that comment below but I plan on making it a lot more obvious through some up coming post.
Take care my friend!
https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemitblog/steemit-winter-update-2017-reflection-our-vision-statement-and-mission-and-a-look-forward#@teamsteem/re-steemitblog-steemit-winter-update-2017-reflection-our-vision-statement-and-mission-and-a-look-forward-20180221t053905349z
I tracked this down thanks. All this time we have been wondering how to stop the self voting, while Dan originally already thought of that. I never thought of self voting until today, and I realised (even now) I could make quite a lot by doing so.
I will keep an open mind on both ways methods for now. Looking forward to your post.
Just to be clear I think N^2 is generally better, but not with the current distribution of Steem. If we had a more standard bell curve for steem distribution then I think N^2 would be better. Right now it's a hocky stick, and a hockey stick squared doesn't work for curation.
Glad to know that, although I disagree with the second part of your statement.
I hope we can get to some understanding.
Giving away free Steem is devaluating the whole platform.
How is giving away free Steem better than letting stakeholders sell their Steem to market price?
There are people ready to buy those Steem, how does giving them away make them anything else than less valuable?
This is a great post. It seems like there has been a lot lately surrounding how to grow as an account. Do you think the Steemit team is actually likely to make changes like this in order to help people get recognized and grow? resteemed!
I personally love that regardless of how the stream of steem is running. You swim up attempting to explain the storm isn’t as bad as it feels :D
I am not so sure that exchanges can get stake weighted inflation. They should not power up any Steems, for the case that their holders want to withdraw.
I really found this to be great, as this is a brilliant way to reward holders at the expense of traders. I liked it when stake weighted inflation at the beginning was like 5000%... Each day a trader held their Steem costed him about 1%. That was awesome. I hate short term traders.
I am excited about the prices going up... The rewards are amazing...
Steeming to the moon!
Thanks for sharing @aggroed
Totally agreed on having a second downvote for removing rewards only(and not rep).
I really like the option for an added downvote option, so that reputation doesn't need to be hurt.
I don't understand the concept of a seperate pool for flagging. Do you mean we get a seperate flagging bar?
Clear explanation about linear vs exponential. I don't have an opinion on which is better, as they both seems to have merits. One thing I think with exponential rewards, is that big stake holders will keep getting more steem and that adds more to the inequality I guess.
I'd say exponential is better if we have a better distribution, but linear is better with the distribution we have.
Right now you have 1 pool for upvotes and downvotes. I'd suggesting making two pools. ideally you could delegate from either so you could give a trusted party the ability to downvote on your behalf just like you could delegate steem power now.
So would it work like, if you had 100 steem, you could delegate this to upvote AND downvote?
Ideally I could delegate 100 Up Power to @minnowsupport and delegate 100 Down Power to @steemcleaners from the same 100 Steem Power
That could encourage people more to flag bad content yeah, as it has no consequence on the earnings people might be able to abuse their power more. But on the other hand their cost would be the pool and their efforts.
One of the better alternatives I've read.
Hi, you know? I loved your vulgar words. Jajajjaa
The content of this publication is made with wisdom and much experience in the subject.
You excite me by saying "Steem is better in the hands of active users than mainly in Steem wallets and exchanges." For the people we work with every day here: this message is very encouraging.
I have very bad English. But I understood your publication, I hope you can understand my comment.
The price goes up, people register, active users are increasing. Life is good. I think a great year awaits us.
Love these words. Let these words be fulfilled.
Thank you
If people only stop bidding when it's not profitable.. sigh..
meh, the value isn't just printing money from bid bots but actually getting exposure on teh platform. That's worth sacrificing some dollars for.
Thanks for your $0.02 @aggroed. It's neat to understand a little about how things used to be here. As a newbie straight outta fbland, the positivity and growth I've seen in myself from joining this cryptospace is very motivating! I prayed for a new and better way to social media. Steem's been good to me. Dunno who or why ppl are frustrated. Seems strange they'd be. Unless i am missing something.
I was told it ain't advisable for minnows like me to use bid bots except i have money to throw around. Checked already, Steem is $3+ and guess the activities of steemit will be tripled. New accounts and more active users, guess Steemit will be hitting that 1 million mark pretty soon.
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STOPGracias por el Post. En lo particular creo que hace falta formación en los Bot. Deberíamos tener una especie de Curadores para todos aquellos que apuestan después del máximo de la puja y hacen perder a todo el mundo.
Pienso que hay gente que hace esas cosas por ignorancia y con un llamado de atención de un bot pudiera tomar conciencia de como daña su acción a todos lo que intentan jugar limpiamente.
En cuanto a Ud @aggroed se que hace mucho para que el plancton y los pecesitos tengan micro recompensas pero también esa buena acción no se pueden recuperar. Para el bot es positivo que la gente siga votando y hasta dañar la puja creo que es el reclamo que te hacen porque se entiende que es deliberado para beneficiarte como ballena y testigo.
Creo que eso también afecta tu reputación de como has ido retrocediendo en la confianza de los
Hola @rafagonzalez Interesante reflexión. Vengo siguiendo el hilo de ideas en general donde me encontré un comentario super interesante de @teasteem y luego me enlazo aquí con @aggroed todos valiosos para mi como nueva usuaria.
De todas estas lecturas que he ido siguiendo a lo largo de este día, el final me trajo hasta aquí. Me queda el aprendizaje, que no solo es intentar producir buen contenido, sino documentarse de cómo hacerlo producir de una forma sana y en colaboración de todos. Además, de continuar documentándose del tema, ya que,es proyecto serio donde se requiere esfuerzo en conjunto. Aprovecho a escribirte pues, te encontré en mi idioma y tengo ahorita muchas cosas en la cabeza jeje.
Saludos gratos
Buena vibra.
Saludos mi chiquita... no pienses tanto.
Revisa los monederos de los que están ganando dinero
Allí aprenderás tu también hacerlo. Hay varias logicas los come flor y los lobos ...en estos extremos se mueve la plataforma hay mucha gente haciendo cosas por los demás invierten, ganan dinero y reparten . Hay otros que solo se dedican a que su empresa crezca. Ejemplo si tienes 3 sbd en el monedero. Invierte 2 en el steembottracker.com al principio solo apuesta las bajas de 0.001 para ganar 0.004.
Cuando las mesas ya esten a solo dos minutos de cerrar y si hay ROI positivo de mas de 100% ahí invierte. Iras creciendo poco a poco semana a semana. En la medida que esos dos sbd se te conviertan en 20 sbd en 6 semanas allí vas a despegar. No debes dejar de curar y cambien de comentar.
No comentes a lo que no votan ni responden nunca. No valen la pena y nunca ganaras nada. No sigas a gente que no te comente te llenaran el muro de basura y los que de verdad te interesan se perderán entre tanta información. Recuerde que el que responde vota y eso te da ganancia
te dejo varios link de aplicaciones útiles para monitorear tu empresa de trading @angelica7 en steemit.
https://steemit.com/spanish/@curatorem/estrategia-de-curacion-para-nuevos-usuarios
http://steem.supply/@angelica7
https://steemworld.org/@angelica7
y esta última es la mejor de todas steem-plus mu buena te da poder total
https://v2.steemconnect.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=steem-plus-app&redirect_uri=https://steemit.com/@steem-plus&scope=vote,comment,custom_json,comment_options&state=https://steemit.com/@angelica7
Un gran abrazo y gracias por comentar un articulo de más de 7 días que no te va dar dinero si no que lo hiciste de corazón eso te da carta de presentación de lo valiosa que eres ...rafa a tu orden. Te sigo
Sinceras gracias, voy a hacer mi tarea. Bendiciones por regalarme un rato de tu tiempo y además acompañado de buena disposición. Buena vibra
De que parte del mundo eres?? como te fue con las tareas asignadas?? pensé que eras de Barcelona-España por dominar las tres lenguas: Inglés, Frances y Español..o usas tradutores
Hola Rafa soy de Venezuela. Me apoyo en los traductores. Saludos cordiales
Esta bien hermanita...
Or the minnows could get SBD / STEEM by selling something intriguing and demanding payment in SBD / STEEM. Just a crazy idea, I'm sure.
@SteemBay is an auction service set up for this exact idea!
;-) way to promote! I wonder how long we'll have to say this sort of thing before 10 people show up to promote.
I like the part about the ground floor people getting theirs. It makes sense to me that the people who put in the time are rewarded.
I am way over my head on the linar exponential rewards. Ignorance is bliss?
I hope the people who are on other platforms read this post. It has a hopeful tone. As a relatively new guy I kinda need the hope to effectively onboard people.
My wallet is the phatest it's ever been... to day 6 @sneakyninja bid bot or not to?
😾😾😾
Interesting to read some of the history, I have only been here a few months. Only understood 57% of the post. I am just enjoying posting stuff that comes to mind and getting some value back for the value put in. Sounds like though platform is far from perfect now it was harder at points in past to get some traction
This was helpful, and I'm glad to understand better now.
The paying to trend things is, admittedly, very painful to observe. But I'm doing okay these days, so trying to just be content. I'm grateful for what I've got, and no one wants to sound like a whiner, but there is something acutely painful about working long and hard and then watching others fly by because they have the money to do so. But I guess that's also just the world! But I suppose the disappointment comes with thinking Steemit could be different. You make a great case about why it isn't great, but it's better than the worse options. It'll be interesting to see how things develop.
It did occur to me that one way to vastly improve the trending page would be if even a small group of whales would plan to vote together on one authentically great post once or twice a week or something to get it on to the trending page. One trending day would make a biiiig difference to an excellent but undervalued poster, and I think it would serve to increase the morale of everyone on the platform as well as the price of Steem with a better trending page for new/investigating users. Even a couple of authentically great posts from the "little guy" would inspire hope and drive in a lot of people on the platform. It would feel like the possibility of virality really is a thing.
Obviously, I would love for that to happen to me once, but more than that, it really would just be such a good situation for the whole team. Not sure how to get the idea to the right people, but hope it gets there somehow!
Im with you on separating downvotes and flags.
Could curation rewards be the same for both?
If i downvote i still get 25% of my vote's value, perhaps more if others downvote, too?
This would remove most of the loss to downvoting.
I think you got some doublethinc occuring when you say capping whale votes in an n2 environment discourages holding large sp and then say to take away the inflation reward to holding large sp.
If the distribution is the problem, and you admit the n2 is better with a cap, then shouldnt we return to it and discourage holding large sp?
Honestly, who has 100k usd (100mv) to speculate on a blogging experiment?
Not Joe or Jane Average, for sure.
If mass adoption is the goal, then should we continue to favor those not in our target demographic?
We've already turned 800k of them away to go tell their friends we are bs.
Just sayin'.
If the whales want to improve distribution by selling, great.
If they want to push it down to a dime, even better.
Then less wealthy people could afford to buy some.
As a bonus, we get more sp when the price is lower.
I earned most of my sp when the price was under .25 and since the price topped two dollars i havent grown much at all.
Some of which i attribute to being very vocal about the abuse here, but the math works that way, too.
I get 10sp for a dollar at a dime, and half of one at two dollars.
You may be happy to know that were witness downvotes enabled your honesty in this post would have caused me to contemplate removing you from my list.
Having people who are rich hold steem is a good thing. I'm not goign to demonize people that have money. If we want to see higher steem prices, and I think generally speaking most people do we're going to need rich people to buy and hold steem. So, it's not double think. Discouraging people from buying and holding steem is bad for the platform. It'll lower price, slow growth, and not help expose this liberating platform to more people.
You don't actually get more SP when the price is lower. Your post rewards have an ability to go higher if steem price is higher. How much SP you get is relative to the price so it does scale back some with higher prices, but you still make more on a post with high Steem price.
Im for all economic classes holding steem, i simply think valuing the richest over our target demographic, the average, is counterproductive.
We can see that letting the large accounts have most of the rewards leads 93% of new accounts to abandon the game.
If mass appeal is our goal, this aint it.
Price is going to be a trade off.
More incentive to buy in will put upward pressure on the price.
Do we want to appeal to those with more than 100k usd (100mv) to speculate, or do we want to encourage those with less to have a reason to invest?
I suggest that it is those with less.
If we want steem to be adopted as currency we need lots of adoption.
Currently 800k newbs havent come back, that is a clue.
If investing 1k usd has less impact because of the whale sp's advantage in the math, who would do that?
Again, being against a vote cap and for taking away interest to target the largest accounts is contradictory.
Is 'stake based' interest somehow favoring large accounts?
Do large accounts get a larger share just for being large, or is the interest i get the same as a percentage?
Do we both get 1% more, or do large accounts get 2% and small accounts 1%?
For clarity, once we have enough dolphins, and not solely whale/bidbot created golden boys, the cap (Id suggest 100mv, as a community decision and not in the code) can be increased to allow larger investments to benefit more from curation.
But until rewards are allowed to grow these dolphins, allowing the whales/vote selling bots to suck it all up to give to their sycophants/customers is decimating adoption.
A higher price gives more usd value, but less steem.
This early in the game id rather have more steem.
thanks for writing this. I've never really understood how it was around here before I showed up in July. It makes more sense to me know and gives me a better foundation and perspective. I agree with the things you've said that I understand and suspect I agree with your points that I don't understand yet lol. Great read!
Thanks for the rich history, I had always wondered what steemit evolved from before all the hard forks, I also think bid bots aren't all that bad and that people tend to over exaggerate the negative impact they have on the platform. And as for which reward system to adopt, I guess im still too new to tell since I've only experienced the linear one.
Cheers for the informative post and the story of how much you used to earn just motivated me to grind even harder.
Thanks @aggroed for helping me learn something today!
Besides my comment, "distribution" has been mentioned 26 times in your post and the comments...
Is this distribution the payout of rewards? both author and curating...?
Is this sentence the key I'm looking for?
What is this magical bell curve you speak of?
How could it be obtained?
BTW, I like the other points you make in your post. They seem to me to be good ideas!
distribution is a term that describes the current state of steem power ownership.
A good distribution would be a bell curve, and likely a bell curve somewhat favoring the wealthy.
What we have now is a clear oligarchy where 100 account out of nearly 1M own 93%.
Aha! That makes sense. I was thinking it was how the payouts were distributed. You've cleared up my misconception. THANKS @aggroed!!!
90% of the steem is in top 100 accounts here. This really makes very difficult for new users to earn here. I am also working very hard since last one year and not able to earn very much. New comers become frustrated due to it and leave the platform in despair. Although new joinings are very high here and their retention is not high. This should also be fixed and some great ideas to be implemented for it to get the exposure of new comers. Some fixes may be the limit on daily number of posts, votes and comments. I am not an expert like you but these are just my suggestions because sometimes I also feel very disappointed by it.
100% agree! I think something else that needs to be considered is fixing the reputation score. I really like the idea of User Authority that has been discussed. (Actually, it looks like you upvoted this post already, Thanks! I'm assuming that means that you already read it...)
Also another huge weakness that you alluded to is the trending page. I think that our feeds need a huge upgrade. I just finished my proof of concept of this idea. (I am just squashing bugs right now and looking for people to help me test it). Basically it is a feed that uses your voting history to determine people that vote similarly to you and shows you more things that those people have voted on. It has helped me find many great posts (like this one!)