RE: Improving the Economics of Steem: A Community Proposal

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josephsavage 7 years ago

the reward curve, in my opinion, increases the incentive to use voting bots to upvote your content

People will figure out how many rshares are needed to tip the curve. Bid-bots will have that as a minimum bid amount, and nothing will change (except that smaller accounts will be priced out and the incentives to consolidate stake will reduce scale of bot-nets).

The real issues are not economic or distribution issues, they are philosophical. As long as the prevalent perspective is that somebody (anybody?) has the right to dictate how others use their stake, there will always be conflict around how stake is being used and how rewards are distributed.

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4 votes

smooth 7 years ago (edited)

There is no real "tip" of the curve, it is gradual. Anyone placing a vote with the intent of rewarding the content benefits from additional votes added on top of it because of the continual convergence to linear.

The idea of this curve is to heavily penalize microvotes which attempt to slip under the radar with a million comments each earning 0.03. It probably won't have much effect (though still a little) on larger payouts including most paid votes.

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josephsavage 7 years ago

It probably won't have much effect (though still a little) on larger payouts including most paid votes.

This is the primary point I was trying to make. As for the 'tip' of the curve... using this curve from @vandeberg's post, the point I marked in red was the point I was thinking of...

While the curve itself is gradual, this is the vote level where rewards with n^2 and linear cross. I don't know what his scale is, but if the 0.5 shown represents a STEEM value of vote, then I think it's way too high.

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smooth 7 years ago

Yeah I agree we will need to assess some actual curve if and when it is proposed. We may disagree on the need for some sort of inhibiting of small-ish payouts on the low end. I do think they are necessary, even if not ideal from a fairness or interaction point of views. Like most things it is a matter of tradeoffs.

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valued-customer 7 years ago

Well, if the trade off you substantial stakeholders consider a-ok eliminate any interest new users have to come here, I'll be looking for the next platform where I can speak freely you didn't kill yet.

More pressure on retention is suicidal.

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iflagtrash 7 years ago

I flag trash. You have received a flag.

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trafalgar 7 years ago (edited)

If I'm not mistaken, the intersection of where n and n^2 cross has no bearing on the significance of that 0.5 point on the X axis on the n^2/(n+1) curve.

Recall that these are graphs of the derivatives, not the curves themselves. The point you've marked there is roughly where the derivative of n^2/(n+1) would have a linear tangent. In other words, it's where the second derivative of n^2/(n+1) roughly equals to 1, which has no real relevance that I can see.

I agree with Smooth that the proposed n^2/(n+1) curve just as a superlinear head and approximates to linear. The effects are to ward off profitable micro voting which happens already, but would likely increase in an otherwise new working economic scheme (higher curation, some free downvotes) because other avenues of abuse would be more noticeable and thus less profitable.

Ideally, I'd probably prefer just a 'spam tax' of say 30-50% up until Steem value is around 1, and then completely normal linear after that. But if that can't be implemented, then I'm ok with whatever convergent linear approximation curve.

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josephsavage 7 years ago

Ideally, I'd probably prefer just a 'spam tax' of say 30-50% up until Steem value is around 1, and then completely normal linear after that.

If the goal is to kill off the remaining steem user-base, then I would say that's a great idea. The average post payout is only a little more than 1 SBD (about 3 STEEM), but strongly skewed by the tiny percent of posts with high upvotes.

The median post payout is closer to $0.08, well below your 'spam' range. Calling the posts by more than 50% of all Steemians 'spam' would be a disaster.

Source: @arcange's Steem Statistics

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mattclarke 7 years ago

Almost all of them are spam, though. There's currently no incentive to put in any more than minimal effort.

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trafalgar 7 years ago (edited)

Yes these figures are true. In practice, my suspicion is the convergent linear curve would actually hit the lower payout posts harder than a 30-50% spam tax, but of course that depends on the numbers.

If we can stop most profitable spam behavior by making low payouts accept 70c to the dollar, it's not a terrible trade off. Keep in mind that when other measures are implemented, self voters and vote selling posts would likely be hit by downvotes and would consider elsewhere. A deterrent to an influx of micro spam votes in order to continuing reaping ones own voting rewards should be considered as this could be really bad for RC and blockchain bloat.

Actual figures can be adjusted. It's really about forcing all profitable behavior into the light and there's no real way to do it without some trade offs.

The median post payout is closer to $0.08, well below your 'spam' range. Calling the posts by more than 50% of all Steemians 'spam' would be a disaster.

Likewise, the median number could be strongly tilted to the low end due to the high levels of pre existing spam.

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4 votes

valued-customer 7 years ago

"...making low payouts accept 70c to the dollar, it's not a terrible trade off."

You clearly speak for yourself, selfvoter. Regressive taxes that benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor are always terrible trade offs. The more I read your comments, the more I observe the dichotomy between your rhetoric and your actions.

We have an awful problem with retention now, and this would horribly worsen it.

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iflagtrash 7 years ago

I flag trash. You have received a flag.

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bryan-imhoff 7 years ago

But even if its intent is to cull comment spam farming, it utterly destroys rewards for organic interaction between small accounts. When people make good, legitimate comments on my posts I like to hit them with a 25% vote and reply. That gives them about .03 which is just above the dust threshold which already penalizes small accounts. Likewise most accounts posts see very small rewards of a few cents on their posts, but they are legitimate, organic, and quality content. To cripple all these actions and shunt that value more toward whale votes & bid bot voted content is a negative. We’d effectively be creating a system where the majority of accounts are more likely to see decreased or even zero rewards, as they never see a large payout on an individual post.

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smooth 7 years ago (edited)

I think we need to see actual numbers and a specific curve before we can judge this. There will be some cases where small interactions are inhibited but there are already some cases where small accounts can't by themselves generate a reward large enough to actually pay out. These are all tradeoffs.

One thing to consider is that if massive reward-mining operations are curtailed even somewhat, there will be a lot more Steem left in the reward pool and the sorts of small interactions you describe may therefore generate larger rewards, despite being somewhat inhibited by a curve. There are two parts of any reward calculation, one being the curve and the other being the total size of the reward pool and what else is pulling from it.

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smooth 7 years ago (edited)

Nonetheless, it would also lead to higher concentrations of votes on fewer accounts

In some sense that is the idea since self-voting is the opposite of that.

The real question is one of degree. You don't want everyone voting for themselves (maximum spread across maximum accounts) but you also don't want too much concentration that doesn't help the value of Steem (that being said, very high value contributors with a large audience are indeed worth a lot in what they bring and give back, which is why such people are paid a lot on other platforms).

All that being said, curation itself doesn't necessarily encourage extreme concentration of votes. Once there are a lot of votes on a piece of content, voting for it will earn sub-par curation rewards. To maximize curation, you are better off finding something else that isn't heavily voted yet.

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valued-customer 7 years ago

These proposals don't reduce incentive to self vote or delegate to bidbots at all. They increase those incentives for substantial stakeholders, at the expense of almost all accounts.

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6 votes

iflagtrash 7 years ago

I flag trash. You have received a flag.

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smooth 7 years ago

I disagree. The curve change doesn't reduce the incentive to self vote or delegate to bid bots, and if that were the only change it could even make things worse. The other two changes (cheaper downvotes and higher share of rewards going to curation) do reduce the incentive to self-vote and delegate to bidbots. That does not necessarily mean they would solve every problem or even any problem, but its wrong to say they don't change incentives.

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raycoms 7 years ago

Yeah, that's why I do support it. Although, together with the adjusted reward curve, I believe it could make the "concentration of votes" too extreme. Especially combined with bid bot usage then.

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smooth 7 years ago

I think we would need to see a specific proposal on the parameters of the curve. If it is too superlinear beyond the low end then I agree.

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raycoms 7 years ago (edited)

yeah it definitely depends strongly on where the main curve lays. If we penalize especially small votes (< 1$ or < 0.1$) but have it almost linear at everything above that might be a good way to avoid bot farming while keeping the rest the same for the vast majority of users. On the other hand if the main curve is around 10-50$ it would be more on the shoulders of the smaller users and lead to more bid bot farming.

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https://steemit.com/steem/@bashadow/re-steemitblog-improving-the-economics-of-steem-a-community-proposal-20190516t193202343z

jamesbrown 7 years ago (edited)

@smooth, having read many of your comments over the years, I've learned to respect your opinion on these type of topics, so, if you don't mind, I 'd like to get your opinion on a proposed solution (by @bashadow) that I read higher up in the comments to this post, one that I believe could have a beneficial impact on voting behaviors.

Below is the link to that comment:

I don't know if it's at all possible, or feasible at the blockchain level, but it seems to me that randomly picking a time within the 7-day payout window to reward as the highest percent curation payout per SP voted on the given post, and then "paying out concentrically" from whatever time is determined (eg if the determined time is 24 hours, then the account closest would get the highest curation payout per used SP and two separate accounts that voted at hours 23 and 25, both 1 hour off from the random generated number, would be paid at the same rate per SP), would be an effective way to remove the incentive to vote within a (small) time window.

I'd love to get your thoughts on this, assuming you can follow what I've attempted to ask.

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smooth 7 years ago (edited)

I don't have an opinion on the 'random curation' proposal, but in general any proposal for randomness on a blockchain is an extremely difficult proposition. I saw one of the replies mentioned looking at the previous block hash. That works to a point, but isn't entirely safe or fair because the block creator can tinker with the block in ways to change the hash into one that subtly favors themselves or a collaborator and it is very difficult to detect this (particularly on non-PoW chains).

Anyway, I don't rule it out, I just haven't studied it enough to have an opinion at this time. There are some ways to properly address the randomness issue if it is really necessarily and helpful, but they are definitely harder than just looking at a block hash and you should be suspicious of someone who suggests that; they probably don't understand blockchains very well.

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jamesbrown 7 years ago

I had a feeling that it wouldn't be so easy to pull off. Thanks for taking the time to explain that.

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trafalgar 7 years ago

Voting bots will likely be strongly deterred by both the addition of a certain amount of free downvotes from a separate pool, as well as more competitive rewards elsewhere in the form of higher curation.

It's difficult to say what the ideal level of voting concentration is other than describing it loosely as the level of concentration that would actually reflect the distribution of rewards if stakeholders voted honestly based on their opinion of the content, and that's precisely what we're going for.

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ew-and-patterns 7 years ago

I would actually join/create a community which downvotes "regular trending bidbot users" everyday with the few free downvotes... and I think others would, too. But I do also think, that more than 2 free downvotes per day would harm the ecosystem more than it would benefit from it.

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trafalgar 7 years ago

I virtually 100% agree with you here!

The figure I basically had in mind was 25% (or 2.5) per day. Obviously free downvotes have their downsides (toxicity, abuse etc) but they need to be enough to threaten the status quo. I feel that anything between 1.5-3.5 might be a reasonable guess.

So as a self voter and a conspicuous one at that, i'd expect that my farm posts would be nuked to oblivion when these changes are implemented by free downvotes. Good. I, and others like me, will get the message loud and clear and would likely not bother continuing farming, especially when curation is paying a decent amount (say 50%). We will likely not like the fact that others (self voters, vote sellers) get to benefit while we don't. So we'll use our free downvotes to take others down, and paid posts will be pretty high on that list.

The idea is to migrate profitable voting behavior from content indfferent to content reflective behavior. Imagine if the bid bots are now competing as curation services - it'll mean we'll no longer have a proof of brain dead blockchain.

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ew-and-patterns 7 years ago

I am not sure if this solves the problem of bidbots and self-voting. It will be very hard to bring down a 200$ trending post when it is voted up 13 hours before payout, leaving you with just 1hour to downvote it...
I think bidbots will come up with some autovote function. Pay now, get voted 13 hours before payout...

Maybe (I am very skeptic about it) it is worth a try if nobody figures out something better. But I want a scheduled automatic revoke of these changes UNLESS the community votes to keep it.

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valued-customer 7 years ago

"...distribution of rewards if stakeholders voted honestly based on their opinion of the content..."

That's not at all what you're going for. That's easy to create: simply eliminate curation rewards, and reduce maximum payouts per my proposal. The vast majority of accounts would hugely benefit from that - but that's not your actual goal.

What these proposals do is increase the profitability of self voting and bidbots for large stakeholders - and that's your actual goal.

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iflagtrash 7 years ago

I flag trash. You have received a flag.

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