Has anyone stopped and considered the basic fundamental question of whether this will bring more users in or drive current users away?
I am betting this drives significantly more users away than it brings in...
There is no way downvotes will be used responsibly which more than negates any possible benefits.
The concept of the EIP is about the combined effect of three changes, not just this one. The idea is to make desirable behavior more profitable, and negative behavior less profitable. Currently it's most profitable (and easiest) to delegate your stake to a bidbot and not even play, which is what many large stakeholders are doing. If it becomes more profitable to actually curate content, people will do that. That means more rewards for good authors, and fewer rewards for bidbot delegation (or self voting) and people who choose not to participate. So - if that goal is achieved, more people curating will in turn lead to more good content and people actually being rewarded for that good content. A small portion of 'free' downvotes is a piece of this puzzle.
I think if people are more likely to receive rewards from the effect of stakeholders participating, they will be much more likely to stay. If good content is being appreciated and curated, people will be more likely to stay. It's part of the value proposition of proof of brain and the current economic incentives don't fully align with that original vision. The EIP attempts to bring us back closer to that goal.
Isn't it possible that proof of brain just doesn't work? I would venture to say that stake weighted voting and proof of brain failed when there is money involved. It was a nice idea but human nature and all that makes it work better in theory than in reality. Continuing down this path would be fool-hearty.
But to go down this path slightly... so you think the cure is for stake holders to spend their time on here sniffing out the 10 "highest quality" posts each day among the thousands of other posts? And we think that system will appeal to people? No one wants to come on here and spend all day searching through posts to find the "10 best", it's not fun, it's a job.
And what would compel people to invest money into that system?!
Again, I think you guys need to step back and ask yourself if this is more likely to bring in more people than it drives away? If the answer is no, or not sure, the idea should be scrapped immediately.
People want to be rewarded for their good content. That concept is solid, no doubt about it. People want to be able to monetize their content. Giving incentive to reward good content drives engagement. User's seeing good content being rewarded drives user's to our front door. Using your stake to generate rewards is an incentive to hold SP.
Are there other things that can be done that help user retention? Absolutely - but most of them are front end / applications level work, not blockchain development... The first thing that comes to mind is communities, and the list of other things is certainly long, but attainable.
Under this article one can observe it again: people (whales!) are flagging comments of other users just because they disagree with their opinion!
NOT because of any abuse or over rewarded posts.
As long as you cannot contain this kind a flagging (for example by institute an elected committee with much delegated SP), I am strictly against a pool of free flaggs.
It's not that downvoting doesn't have downsides, they are considerable. It's just that without a modest amount of free downvotes, we don't really have a realistic chance of turning this place around at all.
Currently, we're paying content indifferent voting behavior (self vote, vote selling) 4x more than curation. When we bump curation to 50%, there's still a 2x gap. The modest amount of free downvotes are further designed to bridge that gap.
I'm one of the ones who recommended these specific numbers for the EIP and I can tell you I'm very aware for the adverse effects. Let's say that at any given time, under the EIP they'll be around 5,000,000 SP worth of whales consistently being abusive with their downvotes on purpose. 25% of that is 1.25m SP out there making everyone's lives miserable.
Now look at the flip side, instead of next to nothing, if everything works out, you could have 100m SP worth of upvotes being cast in a relatively honest way that is reflecting their appraisal of the content. And half that money will be finding its way into the pockets of good content creators.
Maybe my numbers are a little optimistic, especially the latter, but overall it seems like a good trade off. We can't focus too much on the negatives alone without looking at the positives.
Thanks for not (yet) flagging me - just kidding. :)
Actually, I like your reply and partly agree with you.
Used in an appropriate way, flags are essential for the success of the community.
'Cheap' posts with huge rewards on tranding are a problem, together with the bid bots.
However, I also know that many users have suffered under unjustified whale flaggs, left (or will leave) the platform and spread that information. Even only just watching 'flag wars' (without being involved themselves) is really deterring for (potential) newbies.
What do you think about my suggestion (if interested you may read more in "My STEEM Vision.") to institute a committee of respected users elected by the community and equipped with sufficient delegated STEEM power, which could be called in such cases of flag abuse and then decide whether the flags were justified or not?
Unjustified whale flags are going to happen with or without free downvotes. Sure, they get a little more juice proportionally, but I don't think of it as breaking (and it's also in fact why the % is not as high as what some people have been pushing for, which is 100%).
The downvote committee can happen today. Don't see what's stopping it. Good luck convincing enough people though. Actually, the downvote committee has a better chance of forming with free downvotes, and funded accordingly.
Unjustified whale flags are going to happen with or without free downvotes.
Crimes will happen with or without police ... Nevertheless I think it's good to have one ...
Sure, they get a little more juice proportionally, but I don't think of it as breaking
In my eyes it's already now way too much. I know people who left STEEM because of unjustified (at least in their eyes) flags, and I know people who didn't want to join after observing how people got flagged (often in an automated way) only because they spoke out their opinion.
(Just see how many comments under this article were flagged again ...)
... (and it's also in fact why the % is not as high as what some people have been pushing for, which is 100%).
... and I already wrote that I think the 'hybrid solution' would cause less damage than two completely separated pools.
The downvote committee can happen today. Don't see what's stopping it. Good luck convincing enough people though.
It won't happen if not supported by someone with a huge amount of SP (for example with a delegation of Steemit, Inc.).
Otherwise it's members either wouldn't dare to flag accounts with much SP or didn't care to write here anymore anyway.
I am not sure that bid bots are really a problem aside from creating envy. Someone's 2 minute blog of junk may earn 1000x more than an 8 hour blog of well researched findings, and of course there is a risk that anyone who bids too much could be crushed by a whale and lose their investment-while the bid bots still benefits. The few whales who come in the name of fairness wanting to help crush the bid bots I doubt will achieve the results they want. It may prove just to be the death knell to the block chain and their own investments.
I am not sure how this help makes things more fair if the bid bots disappear [supposing the price and floating circulation of steem remained unaffected, which it wouldn't], those of us who don't use them will still get about the same amount of votes and earnings.
Those who operate the bid bots, I presume, are keeping a big chunk of the Steem out of circulation. To shut them down would likely cause these bidbot owners to dump their Steem and flood the marketplace...for 13 weeks. If there is a mass dump it is going to hurt steem as an investment....for 13 weeks. One can't blame the people who have started to powerdown, it's is going to likely make steem extremely cheap to buy in the future for the companies failure to protect market value. Maybe this is what the whales want is to buy more on the cheap and have an even greater influence. The abusive whales, who likewise can buy more at a discount, will try to purge more and more people from the platform for an ideological differences causing them to be a greater problem than they are now. Sure the little guys could buy more too, but the little guys aren't earning 6 figures a year and could still be swallowed whole by the abusive whales off the platform. Even if an ordinary person had $10000 extra to spend during the crash, steem would be too much risk as an investment and depending on how low steemit went when they bought in they could still be swallowed whole by an abusive whale. For people in the 3rd world, they stand even less of a chance.
There are threats on the horizon; What steem cofounder Dan (Now of EOS and MEOS )says can kill steemit. Who knows if there is any truth to what Dan says, other than the current [lack of] leadership of steem. If the [lack of] leadership allows such changes to destroy the market value of steem, the MEOS (or whatever it is called) can ensure that by buying enough steem at a discounted rate they can destroy steem's primary utility internally and basically kill steemit.
Ok, but what defines "good content"? Everyone has a different definition of what "good" is, with a major bias towards their own.
But besides that point, we likely won't even get to that part of the discussion because the vast majority of downvotes will be personal in nature instead of altruistic and responsible. What is your solution for that?
Under this article one can observe it again: people (whales!) are flagging comments of other users just because they disagree with their opinion!
NOT because of any abuse or over rewarded posts.
I am sure that won't bring new users here.
Yep, case in point right in this very thread. Downvotes because they can, nothing more nothing less.
Hey, jrcornel ...
I wanted to say I enjoyed your comments. You are spot on!!! Keep going strong!!!
I think seeking perfection with this is really dangerous. I'm in favor of very slow and highly tested development for the curation and distribution systems of steem. The problem with current algos (curation) they are gamed with ML . But that brings you to the bidbots. The bidbots should be used as advertising in certain bidbot feeds on the front ends. I'm really much happier when we find front end solutions to a potentially , non existent blockchain problem. Maybe our problem's solution is just right in front of us. Advertising is a natural thing. How can steemit really innovate the advertising markets and turn them upside down completely? That's your bidbot fix.
Hopefully you are wrong about that, because the Hobo Media project aims to do exactly what you just described. Allow for people to do the "job" of voting the top 10 best journalistic pieces on Steem for the day for large rewards. This concept should work if the theme is sort of like a writing competition, however, in order for that to work the reward needs to be significant.
Isn't it possible that proof of brain just doesn't work? I would venture to say that stake weighted voting and proof of brain failed when there is money involved.
You are talking about yourself, only.
I see no reason that increasing curation rewards in any way changes the extant dynamic for profiteers. It just increases the value to them of upvotes. Increasing curation rewards will be adapted to by bots to encourage hassle free profiteering via delegation.
The actual solution is to remove the ability of stake to profiteer from their votes. I have repeatedly pointed out one mechanism that can do that, the Huey Long algorithm.
I am confident that better minds than mine, such as your own, can devise others. After the EIP fork fails, do give it nominal consideration, please.
I agree, I'm not sure if or why this is actually a priority, except when it comes to the victim's of flag wars. Many of which aren't producing bad content, or plagiarizing. They simply are the "bad guys" to the wrong whales.
Not that this is an easy answer but I think the priority should be to attract new users and let the flag wars continue, and hope those good content producers who have been chased off, are replaced by many new ones!
I just fail to see how this change attracts new users in any way... and that should be our focus. Attracting and keeping users, this change likely does the opposite of that in my opinion.
It's been proven that downvotes won't be used responsibly, even when they had a cost.
The same shop. The same chef. The same ingredients. The same taste. The same price. But now, we are wondering how our pizza-shop will be affected if we start cutting it into 6 pieces instead of 8 pieces
Is it going to attract new customers - no
Is it going to chase away some old customers - maybe, but no
Will it change the earnings of our pizza shop - no
red button, redistribution, changing ratio authors/curators are not going to create anything measurable. Maybe it can even affect negatively because people will be wondering why on Earth those people are discussing this topic when they have at least 100 more important problems?
Shuffling deck chairs on the titanic. SMTs and communities are the only shot out of this mess at this point, though I think these changes will be a net negative, so even worse than just shuffling the deck chairs.
MIRA and ten thousand 'top' witnesses might be able to help. Decentralization is the cure for centralization, and counters the problem of centralization of tokens that is the source of many of the problems Steem has.
Again, nothing but math...
Stolen from @arcange:
As you can see, the median payout is 0,10 $.
Half of the posts earn less than 0,10 $ per post.
Not a single new user will come here to (*most probably) earn 0,10 $ per day. It's maybe 50 $ per year?!
However, there is something completely different that Steemit could do.
I'll send them the official proposal concerning this :D
"Is it going to chase away some old customers - maybe, but no"
I have seen quite a chilling effect on many that I follow. A few of which have been "chased" off and no longer post and have powered down. But your other 2 points I 100% agree. Before they went dark they posted several instances where simple malice were the reason for their flags. Initial content was flagged, they (content creator's) objected, waves of more flags ensued. It had nothing to do w/bad content after the initial flag, which is obviously subjective to begin with...
I think that one of the big things driving away users is new users seeing "shitty" content receiving a big part of the reward shares due to abuse of bots and similar. A downvote pool can be used to discourage bot usage on content which does not deserve to be on the hot or trending page. This guarantees the "quality" of those pages and thus attracts new users in my opinion.
Who defines what's "quality"?
Your premise is that users will use downvotes responsibly even though 3 years of history contradicts that belief.
I don't believe that all users do, but I believe that a significant part of the stakeholders which have significant interest in the platform will try to make a responsible decision for the platform to avoid bad content.
Having, as proposed, a pool similar to 10-25% is not enough for significant abuse (as discussed in the post) but allows the community to action more easily.
If the effect it is going to have is going to be more positive than negative is going to be something we will see.
We'd be stupid to not try though.
No we'd be stupid to try it instead of waiting for SMTs and communities and trying it there first.
By the way, you realize that if only a few people downvote (likely) their downvotes are going to allocate the entire downvote pool, making their votes significantly more impactful than their stake, right?
Also, communities are not going to solve it, they are more a frontend story. And SMTs might as well need it.
Communities and SMTs likely go hand in hand. They solve it becuase steemit becomes part of the base layer and the rewarding layer and content discovery is done within communities where moderators etc can use downvotes or flags and they can set their own economics for each community.
Again the fundamental question is, will these changes bring in users or chase users away and it seems very likely it is going to be more of the second one.
Well, there are objective parameters by which you can determine that.
I could give you a dozen examples.
Photography, art, music. There are objective parameters in each category that determine what is quality and what is not.
Even when concerning quality of text....
But thats not the question really. What i find important is the CHOICE...
The most important change Steem needs is that we introduce choice into our content placement.
Maybe the community is stupid and has a shitty taste in content but it should be able to make that choice for itself. Something which it does not right now.
There is no way downvotes will be used responsibly which more than negates any possible benefits.
But here i completely agree. If there was a way to mask who the downvoter is on a post that would do the trick.
Then you would actually see people acting the way they should. Based on their personal convictions.
If you could encrypt, somehow, the downvoter on a post i guarantee you that bad apples like Bernie, FTG, chbartist... etc would be booted off the platform by the time the community realizes that the system works... I would bet every penny of crypto i have that would happen.
Unfortunately it wont and youre left with an idea that only works if youre incapable of assessing human behavior.
But there is not, because "transparency"! Which will make every downvote personal and not do what they are designed to do at all. Which means, it won't work.
You keep bringing up the "whale experiment" like it was the same thing. It was nothing like what is being proposed here. The whale experiment was a couple of whales that set up to auto downvote (negate) any votes that were over X amount of vests. All they did was put a cap on influence. It couldn't last because eventually people split their stake into different accounts to stay under that max threshold. Completely different than what is being proposed now.
Not sure that would do anything... but yes that is how "quality" will be defined. One man's trash is another man's quality. Though more likely it will be people upvting friends no matter what they put out and downvoting those they dislike no matter what they put out. Please tell me how that is proof of brain?!
'can' is not will. But few users will deploy their downvotes in a way devs have modeled. Most people don't flag, and won't. Most people that do don't do so for reasons we want them to, but because they're pissed off at what someone said.
That's why this comment will be flagged. That's all the proof we need that this will only make things worse.
Just wait until srednas einreb and cgn are succeed in getting him or his many other targets to quit, and they move onto their next target...which could be you. Many people are quitting. The people behind it could be trying to push the latest product Dan is working on, in which case they won't be happy until we are all purged. @Vandeberg 's proposal is causing more people to powerdown and flee as the company is refusing to address existing problems that harm the community.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
-Martin Niemöller
Actually 3 years of history have proven that down votes won't be used responsibly. It will be 95% personal.