RE: Improving the Economics of Steem: A Community Proposal

You are viewing a single comment's thread from:

RE: Improving the Economics of Steem: A Community Proposal

mattockfs in #steem • 7 years ago (edited)

I think you are absolutely right that "content indifferent voting being paid 4x more than honest content reflective voting" isn't really addressed by my proposal. But that is because I don't view that part as being most directly causal to problems with the current economic model. STEEM is two economies folded into one, and that creates a number of challenges where these two economies touch.

One aspect of the economy is made up of content providers whose contribution is increasing the intrinsic value of the platform with top content. An other aspect of the economy is made up of big investors whose primary contributions are not selling off their stake and, optionally, create incentive for top content providers to choose the platform.

A healthy economy would

draw in top content providers
allow investors who care about the intrinsic value of their investments to further incentivy top content.
allow investors who only care about short term returns to do so without disrupting the content platform.

From where I am standing, my proposal would improve all three of these things where yours addresses some of these aspects while frustrating other.

To illustrate, lets consider two scenarios:

Stakeholder out to make a quick profit runs a powerful bid bot that never posts anything (nothing to flag). Crap content provider uses the bidbot to post crap content. He ends up with a massive reputation (bullet proof from flags) and huts the content economy.
The stakeholder makes one root post. Then ten times a day he comments on his own post with a 100% upvote of his own comment.

I want to argue that:

Scenario 2 is the most desirable behavior as it does in no way disrupt the content economy.
Your proposal favors scenario 1
My proposal favors scenario 2.

With respect to Steemit Inc only making about $3k a month, that only underlines the need to draw in top content providers with advertising revenues. Advertising should be a blockchain wide economy capable of drawing in top content providers who would miss out on hundreds, and for some thousands, of euros per month if they switched to STEEM today. Given that an advertising economy would be a huge new user boost for the STEEM economy, implement it would balance against your reward curve or my fish-size bonus. Something I feel is very important from a social equality point of view.

Hope I am making sense with all of this.

7 years ago in #steem by mattockfs

0.00 BPC

Sort:

Trending

[-]

trafalgar 7 years ago (edited)

I think you are absolutely right that "content indifferent voting being paid 4x more than honest content reflective voting" isn't really addressed by my proposal.

We strongly disagree here. I view this as of paramount importance and absence this, we have a completely dysfunctional social media platform due to its inability to discover and reward content. (and it's a complete failure right now). I strongly believe that a working platform with respect to the above vision would in turn greatly attract users, interest, businesses and ultimately investors would benefit far more than being forced to mindlessly defecate in public to obtain their staking returns.

There's no real distinction between an economy that favors vote selling (bid botting) and self voting. You're describing the current one, they're both content indifferent behavior. If your proposal favors 10x self voting, that would eventually be nearly the total equilibrium of staking behavior (it's already like 70%), which means you can't possibly 'draw in content creators' as soon there will be literally no rewards for them left on the table.

My proposal does not favor bid botting over self voting. It's an attempt to overturn the norm of content indifferent voting which they both are. A combination of higher curation and a certain amount of free downvotes is likely enough to actually turn the dominant form of profitable voting behavior here to become a content reflective voting behavior, either directly or through use of a curation bot. Because curation is a zero sum game and there's a 15 minute tax timer, it pretty much forces fair play as long as the other incentives compel us to play at all. The hard part is optimizing the numbers around curation and amount of free downvotes to maximize effectiveness over costs.

Intentionally designing a platform that encourages stakers to vote 10x on their own posts a day and to view voting rewards as staking rewards is a bad idea. It's exactly what we have today (albeit unintentionally), it's a flaw, not a feature. The current price is indicative of investor interest in a broken platform that encourages this behavior. This is the most obvious redundant use of inflation. Why have an inflation if it's just to make investors spam on a garbage platform just to get their staking returns? Why not just remove the inflation and internalize that value into the currency itself? The only justification for having an inflation is if that inflation is distributed in a way that brings in more value than having the inflation itself, for example, steadily passing currency from the stakers to the talented content creators to incentivize them and expand into a robust social media discovery and rewards ecosystem.

0.00 BPC

5 votes

[-]

mattockfs 7 years ago

I feel you really underestimate the importance of social pressure and of the potential of an advertising economy. The important distinction is that providing a functioning advertising system and removing the reputation benefits from bot up votes together removes the incentive to use bid bots and shifts the most viable business model for bid bot owners to either the 10x up vote of their own posts, or the I believe preferable 10x up vote of their own comments (as this won't affect trending and won't undermine the content part of the platform).

Your proposals taken together, especially the down vote pool make the opposite move more likely to occur. Remember, bid bots don't need to post and down voting bid bot users just for being bid bot users misses the actual abusers. So by implementing features likely to hit the own-comment up voters that leave bid bot owners bullet proof in all ways that count do in the end promote bid bots over comment up votes.

From a short term money flow perspective both may be equivalent, comment up votes don't disrupt trending and don't disrupt the reputation system and are thus by far preferable. And if you end up discouraging both, in the end this would likely lead to the big players without an intent to curate powering down and selling their stake, driving down prices.

I feel we want to keep as many big players on board for market risk sake, but in the meantime add an advertising economy that makes us less dependent on inflation all together and that can help us make abusing the voting system something that people do become socially accountable for.

0.00 BPC