PoB is not Happening Here [/fullstop]
According to Steem’s blue paper, the authors derive the term Proof of Brain from two token features introduced to the cryptosphere by the Steem blockchain. They say these two features make Steem both “social” and “smart” compared to chains like ether and bitcoin.
Interestingly enough, they used air quotes for smart and social. Perhaps this is because, when you examine the features, they are flawed. If they derive PoB from two features, and one of these features isn’t real, the proof-of-brain on the blockchain does not exist.
The sooner we can come to this realization as a community, the quicker we can stop trying to mold human behavior to fit the product, and then we can start trying to adjust either the condenser or the blockchain to accommodate human behavior. This is how things in a competitive marketplace work. Ultimately, the product which best fits the customer will succeed. Also, bear in mind this is opensource software. So anyone can take it, run with it and evolve a better model.
☑ Rewards incentivize content creation and curation.
☐ A voting system that leverages the wisdom of the crowd.
The first of the two features mentioned is called the rewards pool. The blue paper says that the rewards pool is to incentivize content creation and curation. This feature falls into both the social and smart categories. The second feature for proof-of-brain to work is the voting system, which is said to harness the wisdom of the crowd—however, it does not.
I wouldn't at all be so brash or bold as to drop a colossal assertion that proof-of-brain doesn't exist on the blockchain without evidence which supports my claim. Ergo, the video below shall elucidate further on how to harness the wisdom of the crowd in the right way.
For the wisdom of the crowd to work, there must be many participants, and all of them must weigh in with an equal voice. For a myriad of reasons, this is impossible on the Steem blockchain. For starters, all votes are unequal, and we don't have enough people manually voting. These two reasons alone, completely obliterate the notion that we have PoB.
Is it a tragedy? No. Is it unfortunate? Yes. However, the sooner we can accept the reality of reality; The sooner we can shape the product to fit the behavior of people. A handful of whales who downvote or collude to downvote is not a demonstration of crowd wisdom—it's a demonstration of raw power. What it is is collusive upvoting inverted, and instead of picking winners, your picking losers.
If Democracy, as described by Benjamin Franklin, is "two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch." Then how can we illustrate a Steem oligarchy as it pertains to free daily downvotes?
My suggestion is that we stop pretending proof of brain is happening here because it is not. We should also have the realization that many people purchased steem just for that higher upvote and that self-voting was a tick box on the original GUI.
Regardless if their posts are quality or not, if you punish stakeholders for investing, then what you're doing is creating an incentive for them to sell. You're also disincentivizing new buyers from purchasing steem from the market. Just think about it for a moment. Buy this new crypto. Why? So that you can give it away to people who are not yourself. This is not a sticky selling point.
I know it's obnoxious to see people grossly self-rewarding, and it also messes with the order in which stories are placed. But I tell you what; I think we can get closer to harnessing crowd wisdom with some simple condenser-level changes which promote desired behavior but without chasing off stakeholders or souring people to the platform entirely.
- Nix the free flags.
- Put the flag back where it was.
- Remove the downvote button.
- Call the upvote button a reward or tip button.
- Create on the condenser-level Reddit style buttons.
- I call these buttons up sort and down sort.
- They allow one equal vote per post and IP address.
- The up sorts and down sorts are anonymous.
By detaching the up sort and down sort functionality from the crypto, it will provide ample incentive for people to fix trending without doing harm or potential harm to someone else. And unlike someone in Bangkok has recently said, downvoting did not fix trending. I think it's safe to say that the majority of users don't want to read about steem all day long, and this is why we don't go to trending.
So you might be thinking, why should you heed any advice from some random fuckwit on the internet. That's a fantastic question. I'm glad you asked. A UT study suggests that a single account used tethers without sufficient reserves to cause the 2017 BTC bubble. It's common knowledge within the cryptosphere that all cryptos rise and fall as they ride the tailcoat of bitcoin who pioneered the whole thing before it was a thing.
That said, we may never see those prices again without market manipulation. Steem may have found its ground, and it's better than nothing. A lot of cryptos vanished into obscurity. We're still here. The question is, are we going to make it a place worth staying invested in, or are we just going to run around and piss each other off with downvotes?
If we do that and 2021 rolls around, and we find John McAffee chowing down on his bits. Many people are going to be like, fuck this. I've got better things to do, and they'll go and do that. So, if you're still with me in this long-ass spur of the moment post. Instead of immediately criticizing moi for saying shit that needed to be said. Let's think about ways that we can make this place appealing without shitting on our neighbors.
The image above is brought to you courtesy of Pixabay.
thanks for writing such a detailed post about this issue. I agree on some points, but not on all. PoB indeed seems to be not working here as it was intended, but I find the changes with the last HF to be making the experience on here much better. I would argue that it is a long process (which perhaps never finishes) in which rules get fine tuned and changed. I would see it as a pioneering social experiment, it's far from perfect, but the idea is good enough to not give up on it just yet...
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 10/15)
I agree, which is why I'd like to see'em either abandon
the idea of PoB or move towards a better solution. This,
so we can at least work it on the scale of content sorting.
Steem has an amazing ability to draw creativity out of
people. It can still do that, but even better if/when we
can be honest enough to let go of the failed concepts.
Thx for the curate @tobetada, and more importantly
for sharing your thoughts on the proof of brain topic.
added you to my fanbase @steemauto :)
Ty! No telling what I might
post, so be aware of that : -)
Congratulations! Your post has been selected as a daily Steemit truffle! It is listed on rank 10 of all contributions awarded today. You can find the TOP DAILY TRUFFLE PICKS HERE.
I upvoted your contribution because to my mind your post is at least 3 SBD worth and should receive 146 votes. It's now up to the lovely Steemit community to make this come true.
I am
TrufflePig, an Artificial Intelligence Bot that helps minnows and content curators using Machine Learning. If you are curious how I select content, you can find an explanation here!Have a nice day and sincerely yours,
TrufflePigThx @trufflepig, it seems like a very interesting
NLP machine learning project you have going
on over there. Even replacing trending with
trufflepig results would cause a better
looking trending page. There's more
than one way to fix the problem.
I, myself, have written about this in the past (almost 2 years ago now, terrifyingly) – but succinctly, the problem with "Proof of Brain" is that it isn't.
We have a vast amount of experential proof which shows us empirically that the articles which get the most votes are in no way the most intelligent, the most creative, or the most immediately valuable except as representations of a bet. The Steem blockchain is architected as a betting pool, not as a mechanism of content evaluation.
When you place an upvote, that does not communicate to the system "I think this is a good piece of content." If it did, the system would then go out of its way to find more stuff like that and put it in front of you because that's the sort of thing you like. Instead, you are signaling, "I think that other people are going to vote this up." If you are wrong, you lose the potential value of that voting power. If you are right, you are rewarded with resources that can increase your voting power in the future. As your voting power increases, you become one of the people who everyone else is laying bets will upvote certain pieces of content.
Note that the actual content, it's quality, or its nature itself is not mentioned in this description – because it simply doesn't matter. It literally doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is whether or not you can predict what most other people are going to do and do it slightly before they do.
What happens in that kind of environment? Well, exactly what we see on Steem. There is a general collection of one specific type of content which is most likely to get voted up. Because people are lazy and masturbation is obvious, on the Steem blockchain the content most likely to get voted up is content about the Steem blockchain. Everyone knows that talking about the platform is more likely to get activity, focus, and votes than any other type of content. As a result, as a creator, that is exactly what kind of content you try to make in order to attract the attention of the implicit vote value.
The more of it that gets created, the more dilute the particular type becomes, the less likely any particular creator is likely to give voted up, and you see most the votes going toward a very small set (comparatively) of creators, because that is where the votes have always happened in the past.
No brain necessary.
This summarizes the first problem with "Proof of Brain" as an assertion.
The second problem is worse:
There is no "wisdom of crowds." It ain't real. It's never been real. Or at least as it is presented in places like the Steem blue paper and popular culture, it's not real.
The reason that it's not real is an essential misapprehension of understanding about the nature of markets. Markets are very good at finding and expressing the most efficient product or products in a niche. However they are terrible at finding the "best" product in a niche in particularly bad at finding the "best for me" product in a niche.
For a market to be properly communicative, I need to be able to view the output of "people like me." I need to be able to slice through the entirety of everything being freely traded and just look at things important to me. The market as a whole needs to be large enough to support a variety of things such that I can find something that appeals to me, even if it is not what "everyone else" wants. This is especially and particularly important when it comes to intellectual goods and creator generated content.
This is exactly what the Steem blockchain does not do. In fact, it goes out of its way and has always done so, to make it difficult for me to find things that appeal to me, and it really doesn't care about me as an individual or the signals that I'm sending. All he cares about is the pool of active voting power as a singular whole.
Now, there are arguments that the upcoming Community system is going to provide part of the architecture which will allow us to segment all content into things that we are interested in, but look at the points of friction which are defined in engaging with Communities. They actually cost "money" to set up. They cost "money" to open up slots for people to be a member of the community. They seem to be tailor-made to push SMTs and not to actually add useful functionality for the actual use case for social media platform.
Again, they don't care about me (or you) as a user, or as a consumer, or as someone who wants to find things that appeal to them – which is the whole point that any of us are here for.
An essential disconnection at such a fundamental level, both on Proof of Brain requiring none and the Wisdom of Crowds simply not existing suggest to me that, all while your suggestions for changes are well-intentioned, they would be doomed to affective failure. The intention is clearly to make the signals which the user throws to engage with content more individual and less connected with the ultimate betting pool nature of what's going on behind the scenes. You want to build an actual, functional, cut down Reddit-like on top of the Steem blockchain as the backing database.
Unfortunately, that ship has sailed. We are probably a good three years beyond the point at which that would have been effective. And it's sad, but it is true.
The answer to your ultimate question is relatively simple. Because nothing ultimately matters at a content level and the underlying betting pool mechanism is inherent to the architecture, there is no chance in Hell that downvotes are going away and unless something magical happens and someone unrelated to Steemit Inc. figures out something worth selling using the Steem blockchain, it's going to remain just an abstract representation of some kind of value which continues to dwindle.
It's a harsh world.
Thank you for your comment @lextenebris! I can tell you've put a lot of thought into this as well. While I disagree that wisdom of the crowd does not exist, I do agree as you pointed out that despite the blue paper's claim, it does not exist here on steem. So, it would be wise if they either abandon the concept altogether or attempt to honestly achieve it. This cannot be done without radical changes to the blockchain, and that is why I suggest that we try it out with content sorting first, and do it at the condenser level. By using the wisdom of the crowd to sort content, it can result in a better-looking trending page, and that alone would make steem more attractive to potential investors. It's a baby step, won't fix everything, and might not work perfectly, but at the very least, a myriad of steem articles wouldn't be stinking up the joint. Oh, and I think they'll get rid of the downvotes when they realize that it's killing retention and disincentivizing investors. The big question is, by that time, will it be too late?
Here is the terrible truth no one wants to deal with:
It's already too late.
Long past too late.
It is absolutely impossible to move to some other accumulation of popular sentiment mechanism outside of the way the blockchain is currently architected. No changes to condenser would do that because that information is required to be individualized, and as you have already read yourself, the whole idea of the way the blockchain is structured is not individualization but specifically commodified collectivism.
There is no way to abandon the concept and still have an architecture.
Content sorting, along with a multitude of discovery mechanisms which I and others have been talking about for two years or more, are not what 80% of the people involved with the development of the Steem blockchain are interested in. They're just not interested in that. Despite the fact that the last two decades of social media platform development have moved from collectivist assumptions about how platform discovery occurs and inevitably toward more individualized approaches, the people developing for Steemit and applications which are integrated with the Steem blockchain are simply uninterested. In part because that kind of information requires its own database in order to track and understand information of that class.
Under the hood, "the blockchain" is just fancy handwaving height-speak for "a database." It's a distributed database with a low-trust consensus mechanism, but it's just a database. Individualized personal information which results in personal presentation would require a parallel database which constructs an individualized view of the content of the blockchain. At that point, you're forced to realize that storing mass content is in the problem these days. There are a multitude of decentralized methods of data synchronization which are a lot more efficient and effective than "a blockchain." The only selling points are the hype and the notional returns from the gambling mechanism.
As a game designer, I can tell you first and foremost that one of the central axioms of the universe is, "you get what you reward." If your rewards are tied to gambling predictability, you get more gambling predictability. The entire award architecture underlying the Steem blockchain would have to be changed, and at that point you don't have a blockchain.
Downvotes are a minor part of that. Again, the problem is that voting in either direction is essentially affecting the ante of your bet. Downvotes are anti-bets. They don't actually signify that you dislike content, as you can see referenced at multiple points and in common understanding, all they do is exert pressure scaled with your Steem Power on that betting pool.
Potential investors don't care about upvotes and downvotes. But more importantly, we shouldn't care about potential investors. Investors want to put their money in something that makes money and returns money to them. They want to put their money into a thing that works for the primary function that it has been pitched for. First and foremost. If it's working and turning a profit, and there getting a cut of the profit, that's all they want.
But first it has to work.
Caring about investors won't make it work.
And that's the problem.
At this point, the Steem blockchain and the interfaces available to it don't even serve as a decent, stable, decentralized blogging platform. Forget social media network; just targeting being an effective blogging platform is one of the lowest possible rungs to hit. It doesn't even do that well, especially in light of established competition like Medium, which provides a more pleasant editing interface, a better reading interface, and even better discovery.
If one is not a cryptocultist, what is the motivation for using the Steem blockchain? What is the use case? How is it even better than Reddit, which is and was a better designed for social media communication than the Steem blockchain?
Those are the questions which are going to plague the place until it burns down.
Would I like to see the Steem blockchain become a place where creators actually feel valued and people actually go to find content that there actually interested in? Sure.
Is it likely to happen? Not a chance in Hell.
Until and unless someone gets serious about thinking about the fact that users are supposed to be doing something on this platform and getting some value out of it by their interaction and not just playing a betting game, no good shall come of it. Nothing on the roadmap or in the recent development discussions have given me the feeling that anyone involved is really interested in that kind of thinking.
Again, it's a harsh world.
They can be not interested all they like but that
won't solve the problem of valueless steeem.
The problem with gamblers is that they always lose. The Huey Long algorithm discourages gambling, and I reckon it would restore the curative purpose of voting, since every other platform I am aware of that allows voting is pretty strongly reflective of curative intent by voters. It is the jackpot potential of the betting pool on Steem that eliminates curative purpose for votes.
Along with UI improvements you seem to have in mind, enabling discovery of content, how do you think that would impact Steem?
Thanks!
Being familiar with Louisiana political and social history, I would hesitate to refer to anything I considered positive as "the Huey Long algorithm." Part of the problem is that you feel comfortable thinking of the solution as an issue of economic redistribution – and that is essentially a failure of thinking of the same type that led us to the problems we currently have.
You are specifically thinking of "one man, one vote" as a better way of evoking the Wisdom of Crowds, and that's just not so. The underlying assumption that the collective is better able to determine what is good for the individual is a problem – THE problem.
As a result of that thinking, you have the conflation of allocated value/reward with discoverability. I don't have a problem with the way that the Steem blockchain allocates the reward pool, interestingly enough. It is stake-allocated, and that provides economic reward to those who have already sunk money in and that's what they want to promote more of. Actively confusing "what is most rewarded" with "good content" is the toxic intellectual position.
Every other platform that you are aware of that allows voting takes those votes to be signals to the platform about what the user wants to see more of, and then uses that information to show them more of it. They explicitly don't have that signal conflated with the means of allocating some sort of intentionally financial reward.
It is NOT the jackpot potential of the betting pool on Steem that eliminates curative purpose for votes, it's the fact that what users do on the Steem blockchain when they signal is explicitly not curation. Their signaling makes absolutely no difference to their experience on a short-term, straightforward basis.
The irony is that I've already written about all of this, a long time ago. Two years ago now, in fact.
Okay, let's assume that I'm not going along with any Huey Long nonsense, but on top of getting to absolutely rearchitect the voting systems so that it's decoupled from the financial reward mechanism, altogether, the reward mechanism is based on a more deliberate tipping mechanism, we actually get a real Community mechanism and not this bullshit Community system that is slaved to SMTs…
How would that impact Steem?
It would be an entirely different product in every single way.
Nothing about it would be the same thing. Let's not lie to ourselves and say that it would. It would be an entirely different creature, not only in the user facing interface but in the underlying assumptions and in the way that they are reified in the user experience. Nothing about it would be the same.
We would just be building an entirely new social network platform.
I appreciate your substantive reply.
Well the problem is distribution, so the solution is distribution.
By Huey Long algorithm I mean that no post should be rewarded less than 3% nor more than 300% of the median payout, just as he proposed for income, shortly before his assassination, during the Great Depression.
We disagree about a lot of details, and despite disagreeing with you, I do respect your estimable intellectual understanding, which is why I asked you. Substantial disagreements are that we should decouple voting from financial rewards, or that we should favor profiteering as code now does. I reckon the inflation rewards mechanism enables folks to see the value of their upvotes as 'free money', even though it's not true, and this is not the same in a tipping platform where those upvotes come out of their wallets.
Frankly, it's a stroke of marketing genius, and it'd be the last thing I removed from Steem. However the median payout on a post is about 1500% lower than the average, because some few posts are manipulated by stake so that profit from them is sucked into the wallets of whales, and this is a lot of the reason for dismal user retention, and failure of the market for Steem to grow. Whales extract ~90% of rewards using stake weighting. HF21 makes the problem of profiteering worse, and it is demonstrable that profiteering destroys. It is the opposite of investing, decreasing the price of an investment vehicle, while investing for capital gains is focused on raising the price. I submit examples of profiteering as Bain Capital Partners, and of investing for capital gains of Berkshire Hathaway, and note that BCP does profit the partners, but cause other investors to suffer losses, as well as clients, employees, the companies themselves, and the communities they are in. BH makes far more money by not selling the assets of the undervalued companies they invest in by improving their products and market share, and produce the opposite effect on clients, employees, the companies themselves, and their communities.
Society is the source of value of any money, and user retention grows the size of the market, which enabling Steem rewards to encourage authors has done, and would do again, I believe. Every HF has serially increased the ability of stake weighting to extract rewards, and the price of Steem has serially declined in lockstep with the decline of users as user retention has plummeted in response.
You can't solve a problem unless you address it.
Thanks!
If you start from an invalid axiom, you have no chance of coming up with a solution that solves your problem. The problem just is not distribution. Or at least not distribution in the sense of anything in the scale of the reward mechanism.
I suspect that we would substantively agree that the presence of extremely large stakeholders whose stake actually preexists subsequent distributive cycles significantly and seriously disrupts the process of reward as it is currently defined on the Steem blockchain. That's not to say that there should not be extremely large stakeholders like Steemit Inc., because the system simply wouldn't work without their backing, but having preeminent investors playing semi-active roles in reward distribution with that power scaled by the degree of their investment – that was never going to end up turning up content which is widely thought of as "good."
That's a distributive problem, but it's not the underlying problem here. That is a compounding problem.
The underlying problem is that the basic assumption, that the will of the many is better and more effective at finding what is "good" than my own judgment and that this wider definition of "good" is inherently better and more reasonable than my own – that's a problem. And it can't be fixed by worrying about distribution or redistribution. It is inherent.
You could reckon that because they do – because it is true. It may not be a truth that you want to be true, but it is an accurate assessment of what is happening. It is "free money," in the sense that it doesn't come from them and the odds are that it wasn't going to flow to them, so it really doesn't matter where they put their votes except in so far as they can steer an infinitesimal part of that reward pool to their own pockets as part of "curation" (which is nothing of the sort, because it is just a betting pool for all the reasons that I've outlined before).
The whole system is a game designed to encourage and drive profiteering because that is all there is to do in the game. That is it. That is the sum total. No other engagement with the mechanism is particularly rewarding. It's worth noting at this point that thanks to the recent HF curve changes, creating content is less rewarding than ever for everyone but a very tiny portion of the user base.
That works out great for the people who see the whole thing, properly, as a voting gambling pool. With a lower volume stream of content, the odds of betting successfully on what other people are going to bet on out of the smaller pool increases significantly.
Let me repeat that for the people in the back may not be paying attention:
Having LESS content on the Steem blockchain on a per hour basis is actively a positive for those who are engaging with the platform as a betting game because it improves the likelihood of their payout.
A cynic who easily believed in the intelligence of others might steeple their fingers and say "all according to plan," but I don't think the folks involved with the design and implementation of the Steem blockchain of that smart. I think it's an unintentional win for them.
The original intent of the inflation pool going to curators and creators on the blockchain was to solve one of the critical problems in cryptocurrency in general, the fact that there is actually no real way to earn money usefully from other people because there is no point of entry except for deliberately and actively connecting to fiat. There's no way to earn a living because nobody has it. Content creation and curation were intended to be the on ramp for that kind of value.
It failed.
And here you betray a misunderstanding of your own point.
Yes, "free money" from the inflation pool was a pretty brilliant marketing strategy, but not because it was going to reward the day-to-day content creator. It was deliberately and intentionally created to draw whales, because of exactly the point you point out. Having money locked into the system (Proof of Stake) gives you more opportunity to work the system to acquire funds which make the investment worthwhile to have made. Remove the ability for whales to get a commanding payout from their sunk investment and you no longer have whales. As a side effect, you no longer have orca, minnows, redfish, plankton, or the rest of the ocean because whales are funding the water.
That's the nature of the world. That is why there are whales functioning in our ecosystem at all. They are present because they believe they can make a profit from the natural functioning of the architecture. If they can't, they go elsewhere. If they go elsewhere, the whole thing collapses because there is literally "no there there." There is no inherent value being generated by the platform to its user base beyond the speculation on the betting pool.
And that goes back to my original point – that there is no Proof of Brain, there is no Wisdom of Crowds, and absent those things being true, because the platform itself ignores the individual contribution, because all he cares about is the aggregate, there is no advantage or value to the individual contributor and they have no need for the platform.
None. Even negative value, if you think of it as sinking your time and effort if those things have value themselves.
Now, it's easy to imagine a system in which that's not true, in which individual contributors receive value from the functioning of the system even if that value isn't fiscally transmitted. All you have to do is look around at every other successful social media platform on earth at this point. Each of them deliver what the users consider to be a valuable service because they provide a connection between people and the content that they want to consume and the people that make that content. Each of them provides inherent mechanisms to make that triad happen.
The Steem blockchain does not, and it goes out of its way not to do so.
Society isn't the source of value of anything. Society has no will. Society is an emergent property of other things. Those "other things" are individuals. Individuals decide what is valuable to them. When something is valuable to them, individuals are interested in giving something someone else considers valuable in exchange. It is from those decisions, those actions, that society grows. Society does not exist and press itself upon individuals because it has no existence aside from individuals. Individuals choose, individuals act, individuals value. Trying to understand the process by which humans operate by externalizing that set of behaviors is doomed to failure up front.
It is, ultimately, the same mistake as the original designers of the Steem blockchain (as a social platform) made. They believed that there was a crowd to have the wisdom of and failed to note that there is only wisdom distributed amongst "the crowd."
I believe that the ever increasing obsession of the technical team behind the Steem blockchain with increasing the effect of stake is largely because either they or an organization that they are attached to has stake, and everyone involved is obsessed with the idea of cryptocurrency as revelatory technology and haven't really had the experience or the exposure to understand that outside the world of the cryptocultist, nobody gives a rat's ass about Proof of Brain, stake scaling, "curation curves," or any of the other 10,000 useless bits that get inevitably and exhaustively kicked around.
Normal users care about some very paricular things and one those things:
Does this platform provide a useful service to me? Does it do something that I find inherently pleasurable or rewarding because of the dynamic that occurs when I engage with it? Does it make me happy? Does it give me joy? Does it give me the gratification of consistent outrage?
Does it serve a useful purpose?
The problem of the Steem blockchain is that, up front, first and foremost, pretty much everyone involved with it has run as hard as they can away from the fact that it's supposed to be a social media platform. First and foremost. That is its value. When it fails to do that, it doesn't matter how technically advanced or how tightly tuned the rewards curve is. Without it being a useful tool for the users, the token is worthless. Without it being a useful tool for the users, the platform is worthless.
You can't solve a problem if you address something that's not the problem. The problem is not the distribution of funds across the blockchain. The problem is not the fact that there are whales. The problem is not that the ownership of Steem follows a Pareto curve at pretty much every point. The problem is not profiteering.
The problem is that there is no actual value to be salvaged from the system to or from the individual contributor, and so individual contributors go away and do something else. As a result, like boiling water off of a sauce, that which remains becomes that much more concentrated, more obsessed with cryptocurrency itself, more masturbatory, more self-referential, and more driven by the only thing that actually gets rewarded – playing the game of the betting pool.
As a game designer, I've said it before and I will say it a million times more, you get what you reward. You get more users when you reward users. You get more content creators when you reward content creators (and not necessarily financially). You get more content consumers when you reward content consumers. And you get more bots, more people obsessed with playing the numbers game, more people looking to exploit the underlying mechanics, more investors looking for a quick pump and dump, when that is what you go out of your way to reward.
And that's what we see.
No amount of capping rewards on either end will do anything other than make fewer people interested in getting rewarded. I realize that for an aspiring socialist, the idea that all problems can be solved by forcing other people to go along with your monetary policy is a compelling concept, but it just doesn't work like that. We know it doesn't work like that because that very idea is largely what you are complaining about when it comes to talking about HF reward curves.
The problem is not just picking the right numbers and making sure people "don't make too much." That just makes people go do other things. The problem is that they aren't giving individuals what individuals want. Shortchanging the individual at the theoretical advantage of the crowd is the exactly what the Steem blockchain is designed to do. Maybe not intended to do, but definitely designed to.
This is a pretty great comment. You've said and explained some things that I've struggled to put into words. Things that seem obvious to me, but are somewhat difficult to convey. Thank you.
To put it all in a more succinct, perhaps more accessible way…
In order for people to trade one thing for another, they have to perceive that it has value to them. Money with numbers attached is just how we keep score. The underlying valuation is just one more game.
In theory, the underlying value of STEEM is the pleasure/gratification that an individual consumer of the content will get from the act of consumption. In theory, taken as an aggregate, the value of STEEM is roughly analogous in a relative sense to the amount of gratification that individuals will get out of the content posted to the blockchain.
Maybe the real problem is that the value of the commodity is actually accurately conveying that aggregate value. When the value was high, more people were posting a wider variety of things to the blockchain, keeping more people interested in engaging with it. As the value fell, less diverse and less interesting content got posted to the blockchain, which resulted in less valuation for the underlying token. Maybe the problem is that it's a good proxy.
(There are a dozen really good attacks on this idea, starting with the fact that the value of STEEM has tracked pretty well with bitcoin over the last several years, and the value of bitcoin is clearly unrelated to the quality of content on the Steem blockchain. It would be interesting to plot the value of STEEM corrected for the value of bitcoin itself, perhaps by simple ratio, and see if that tracks our general sentiment about the content on the platform.)
Superb commentary, best I think I've ever read here, to bad the chances of them taking it to heart is slim to none even when conveyed to them on such an intellectual level.
I am honestly with the idea of completely removing the reward pool to keep the native coin safe, and only pairing the concept with SMTs (leaving it to the choice of POs).
Thank you for your feedback @dr-frankenstein, I'd have to put some thought into that. I can't say that I necessarily agree, hopefully, SMT's are all they're cracked up to be. However, I have a feeling their inception was predicated on a belief that steem would continue to maintain value over 10 USD. Now that we all know, this is probably not going to be the case, to further fractionalize the steem ecosystem with sub-communities based on alt-tokens will probably be hit and miss at best.
Even the ones that do hit--they may end up being less likely to surpass the value of steem itself. That said, isn't it true that by trying to protect steem in deferring to SMTs, you'll end up killing the market activity of the steem token? If you kill the market for steem, no one will be buying. If no one is buying, then no one is selling, and if no one is selling, then the market has lost all faith in the token. I guess we'll find out. I think that steem-engine gives us some valuable insight into what will come with SMTs. We will probably get a lot of valueless tokens. Maybe there will be some winners too?
You've done some considerable thinking about this, and I appreciate it. However, you simply ignore prior discussions of these specific proposals we have undertaken, and circular thinking isn't going to get you anywhere. Using IP's as some sort of oracle to sort individual users is trivially defeated, for example. Anonymous voting is a fraud superhighway. Changing the labels on the buttons is irrelevant. If I wanted to use Reddit, I'd be on Reddit.
You briefly touched on an actual issue that can be resolved to benefit Steem, and that is
You note that Steem used in this way does not encourage profiteering, but that profiteering is a primary motivation of some people. You seem to imply it's all people, but that's silly. For these people rewarding content is a waste of Steem, when they can reward themselves instead. Who cares about social networking except as a means of generating income anyway?
This reduces society to no more than the mechanism that fills your wallet. Clearly there are many people that approach Steem that way, and some that have put in the time and effort to generate income from other social media platforms. Of course we see this IRL too. All the good deals are made at parties. Lots of people say a lot of things, insincerely, to make money, and a zillion angles on how to make money from people looking at you have eventuated, some beneficial to society, but most an anchor around our necks.
You'd think that if these profiteers used their tricks they'd suck the money out of the system, and it would become useless to folks that wanted to use it for it's socially appropriate purpose - curating content, forming communities to support ideas and policies, and making the leap to self-governance by using the format of post, engagement, and the built in funding mechanism. They'd just leave, and then the token would be increasingly worth less, because the market that makes it worthwhile was shrinking.
Oh, wait. That's exactly what's happening.
You do give money to folks that aren't you every day. Free Speech is no different than any other valuable thing as a reason to spend your money. I bet a lot of your money is spent on it IRL already. So curating content is a reasonable expenditure of funds, and Steem is a particularly useful mechanism to promote speech and communities far more relevant to your interests personally than most media on offer.
No one foregoes income to vote on those other platforms and they vote. Making posts unsuitable for financial manipulation by reducing their value below the cost of that manipulation means that there is no income potential to forego, and then curation would no longer be so monetized that it was prevented from actually pertaining to content preferences.
Might as well fix trending while we're at it. Bring the wisdom of the crowd back.
As long as stake weighting enables profiteers to extract the vast majority of rewards, user retention will remain dismal. I have proposed the Huey Long algorithm to prevent financial manipulation by profiteers, which would leave only that same incentive people have to upvote on Reddit, or other social media platforms, those socially beneficial purposes aforementioned, but won't detail it here because I have discussed it with you previously.
I recall also discussing IP's, and button labeling with you before too. Seems discussion of these matters isn't going to impact your understanding, since you're posting the same proposals here. I'm not really sure what you think these proposals would achieve, since profiteering seems to be the only approach to Steem you consider rational. Flagging rewards back into the pool is a good strategy for profiteering whales, so doesn't make any sense to oppose given that stance on profieering.
The only way to imbue Steem with value is to grow a market for it. The original intention of Steem was to encourage the growth of that market. Profiteering discourages the growth of that market, so needs to be curtailed in order to grow the market and raise the price of Steem, thus profiting ninjaminer and investor alike, by profiting creators. Ninjaminers are the ones preventing that from happening.
Steem languishes as a result. It is the social media that creates the value for the token. Encourage society with the token, and the token will gain value. Keeping that token out of the hands of creators prevents it from gaining value. The original vision outlined in the Blue Paper needs to be achieved for Steem to become the valuable money it was intended to be. Whether the outline was blind sided, or blind siding, doesn't matter, because allowing profiteering to replace the purpose of the token has destroyed the trait of the token that allows to gain value.
Other than limiting per post rewards, what mechanism can discourage profiteering? Note that I am not looking to change human nature, but to effect a rewards mechanism that doesn't financially reward profiteering, and does reward content creation and social engagement financially. Carrots and sticks are what enable civilization, after all, and that is what gives any money it's value.
Thank you, I can assure you that I am not ignoring our prior discussions about this specific proposal. I either disagree, do not understand, or do not comprehend your assertion that it won't work. To be very clear, the software may have to identify that any up-sort or down-sort is coming from an authentic and logged in Steemian. It will allow only one sort per post. The only way to abuse the system will be to create a myriad of sockpuppets. However, you'll also have to find a way to make it so they are not all voting from the same IP address because when the software realizes that post number 25,064,921 suddenly has 723 up-sorts from the same IP address, it will automagically de-rank the post. I think this is fairly sound, but if you can think of a way around it, I'm all ears.
People who buy Steem are at some level enticed to do so for the benefit of having more Steem power. This benefit is not a benefit if they cannot upvote their posts as the former GUI had a tick box for. I mean hell, why not go all out and make self voting impossible, then we can see just how it affects the logic of potential investors. So you want me to buy Steem just so that I can give it away to other people? How about I just feed the homeless instead? There's far less work involved, and I can get that feel-good feeling just by looking at the smile it produces on their faces. In the market, we cannot pretend that self-interest is not a thing. The moment we do, we start breaking shit. Forced altruism is the stuff of dictatorships, and nobody wants to buy into that. You won't see people fighting to become citizens of North Korea, and that's because it's an undesirable atmosphere. There's no there there, and the there that is there is probably starving to death.
I agree that curating content is a reasonable expenditure of funds, I think lots of things are reasonable. However, there is a stark difference between promoting reasonable behavior and forcing it. One leans more towards liberty and the other towards tyranny.
Just be careful what you wish for. If you fix the profiteering issue too well, then you've got another North Korea on your hands. They're not getting any of that good tourist money. The people who do go there to visit are asking for trouble.
The idea is to create a trending page with articles that people want to reward. They'll see high-quality articles on trending with nice rewards, and it will encourage people to get better at content creation. It's not going to solve profiteering, but it won't highlight it either.
If the ninja miners are in it for the long term, they'll delegate to communities. If they're in it for the short term, they'll sell when they think the time is right and there's nothing we can do about that.
With my idea about content-sorting, we can aspire to the blue paper's concept concerning proof-of-brain, but it works for content sorting only. Utilizing crowd wisdom to get people fairer rewards is a far more difficult task, and I say that because I cannot even imagine how to accomplish it without breaking the things and stuff.
Carrots and carrots only. Incentivize, incentivize, incentivize—and gamify too. STINC should highlight the efforts of accounts who engage in awesome levels of curation. There can be a game tab on the top, and it can replace the stupid promotion tab. Have different levels of players/curators who curate high-quality content. So, you can have whales, dolphins, and a minnows category that highlights and gamifies quality curations. This will be a free advertisement for people who are awesome.
Bear in mind people brought their money to steem of their own free will and accord. Punish these folks too hard and you're going to create a lot of downward selling momentum in a market where there are few buyers. Technically the profiteers aren't doing any wrong and might not even be profiteering. Some of those folks might be in the red in accordance with their investment. So it might not even be fair to paint them with a broad brush and call them profiteers. After all, we're currently dealing with a largely valueless token.
In the adult world when you use the stick on other adults it's called assault. People are quick to gravitate towards punishment because many of us were beaten as children and therefore they think it works. However, it doesn't fly in the adult world and if you use a stick or a switch on a kid today it's child abuse and you're liable to go directly to jail. Do not pass go, do not collect 200.00 dollars. If we want a liberty-oriented steem but also don't want profiteers we have to find a way to code it out. If we manage to code out what you call profiteering successfully we'll have to live with the consequences.
I guarantee you those consequences will be a bloodletting of investors and a lack of future ones too. You simply cannot drum self-interest out of the human organism, it's what caused us to get to 2019. Have you seen the movie firefly? They tried to fix the human condition and only ended up making it 100 times worse. I won't spoil it for you, just in case you haven't seen it.
I appreciate the substantive reply.
I am aware of several folks that have thousands of socks, perhaps in the tens of thousands. Competent coders can roll their own VPN's. Beyond that, and even simpler, dynamic IPs make IP utterly unsuitable as a means of ID. TOR exists, and demonstrates that seeking to use IP as a means of enabling 1a1v just ignores actual TCPIP tech. Prove you can change your IP trivially by turning your cable router off, and back on. Voila! a new IP, easy even for a non-techy. Folks with skillz can have as many IPs as they can have socks, which is limited only by the time and treasure they throw at the goal.
This is demonstrably false. Financial benefit is not the only benefit extant. I cannot count the examples that show other benefits people seek than financial. I'll provide one, but know that I only provide one because encyclopedic walls of text would result from trying to provide even a small percentage of them.
@fulltimegeek delegated moderate stake to various users he thought would benefit the community on Steem through having more VP. He didn't seek any direct financial return from doing so. I myself have a similar delegation of stake, though not from @fulltimegeek. The community provides many valuable goods and services that are not money, and are actually far more valuable than money. Reducing the reasons to own Steem to mere ROI so devalues Steem that we have observed it drop in value by almost two orders of magnitude from it's high as Stinc seeks to serve the interests of ninjaminers who grasp only financial value, and thus disregard how doing so destroys their stake - because digits have no value, and society is the source of value.
You do not grasp the value of society. Feeding the homeless just encourages homelessness. Wanna actually help them get off the streets? You'd do better to encourage them to undertake the effort necessary by discouraging them from remaining on the street. Public flogging comes to mind.
The point of curation is clearly as varied as those curating. You may want to feel warm and fuzzy when you encourage someone to do what they're doing. I may want to feel bold and daring by upvoting trolls. Folks interested in ROI will do better to upvote devs and community builders than themselves, because self votes destroy the value of Steem. We have seen that self voting ninjaminers have more tokens, but less value as a result of their incomprehension of investing. It's why we are here and observing extant conditions on Steem.
I have pointed out over and over and over that the market is what gives money value. When the market grows, which can be encouraged by voting, then the tokens are more widely sought, which raises the price. Hoarding does the opposite. Self voting plays keep away with tokens, and whales extract ~90% of rewards using stake to manipulate the rewards mechanism(s).
That's why investors have no interest in self voting: it will not increase the value of their tokens. We can see they are correct because of the actual observable price of Steem and the user retention that has gotten worse every time increasing ability to use stake weighting to extract rewards has been hard forked in.
Warren Buffet wants to make a lot of money. He became the richest man in the world investing. He bought companies and improved them, growing the markets for them, and increasing the value of their tokens (stocks). It's not rocket science, but it seems some people simply cannot beat their heads through the brick wall that keeps them from understanding that encouraging folks to use Steem will grow the market for Steem and increase the value of tokens as the market grows - and nothing else will.
Society is infinitely more valuable than it's financial assets. Take away one of the two and society will retain it's value without reservation. Financial assets will not. They are only imbued with value by society, and the reverse will never be true. To imbue financial assets with value, increase their utility to society. Steem has continually and increasingly done the opposite by increasingly enabling stake to manipulate rewards and extract tokens thereby.
Forced profiteering is too. Disabling the forcing of profiteering is not forcing altruism. It's simply allowing that actual ability to compete in the market. Warren Buffet could have made a lot of money by parting out some of the companies he has purchased, because the price he paid for them was almost always less than the market value of their assets. He has never done so and has made a lot more money than he could have from parting them out.
The code presently prevents altruism by forcing profiteering, and the last post I saw from @felipejoys is a simple acknowledgement of this. Extracting author rewards via stake weighting is tantamount to selling the forges and presses of a factory. It's far less financially rewarding than using that tooling better to attract a larger market, and Steem today is all the proof you need of that.
No. We're in N. Korea now. Forced profiteering is no less tyrannical than forced donations... er, taxes. Profiteers aren't investors. They're destroyers of investments. Bain Capital Partners serially destroys companies by exactly that method. The code isn't random or impartial. It isn't socially agnostic. It deliberately devalues every other metric for value and completely focuses users to use stake weighting to extract rewards by practically eliminating the rewards content creators can attain. That's what HF21 did: cut author rewards in half, added a 10% tax for SPS to the 10% tax we already had to provide witnesses, and doubled the ability of stake to extract rewards via curation.
I am reminded of the old witticism 'the beatings will continue until morale improves.' It's bass ackwards. Rewarding people you want to keep doing the things they're doing will encourage them to keep doing it, like feeding homeless people on the street. BTW, I've been homeless, so I'm not ignorant of what makes people homeless, nor what it takes to not be homeless anymore. I've also been an accredited investor, so neither am ignorant of how to make money investing. I speak of these things from that base of experience.
Actually your best idea.
No, that's not how life works. Those homeless people? No sticks, which is exactly what I mentioned to discourage them from sleeping on the street. Dysentery is a stick, in that sense, which discourages degeneracy, or bad public infrastructure. Sticks are an inevitable part of life, and it is carrots that are optional.
Anyway, until you grasp that money only has value because people give it that value, investing will never make sense, and you will continue to understand only profiteering - which is actually the opposite of investing. Investing builds value and profiteering destroys it. That's why Steem has declined in value by orders of magnitude, and this decline is obviously the result of forcing users to leave by extracting the rewards they should be getting to encourage them to produce content. Profiteering does this to every company it touches. Berkshire Hathaway is an example of investing, and BCP is an example of profiteering. Berkshire Hathaway companies become more valuable (not just in terms of stock price, but in every measurable social metric) and BCP companies are destroyed completely.
Only because the ninjaminers can't sell the content creators themselves does Steem still exist.
Thank you for your reply!
Hmm, it seems like more trouble than it would be worth. If what you say is true, then they've simply got to go with a content discovery algorithm. It looks like @trufflepig might be on the verge of doing just that. They seem to have found some kind of formula using NLP and a machine learning AI. At the very least, get a competing experimental trending page that is a default with an old trending as an option to click. I still think downvotes will poison the atmosphere, and we'd do well to remember that the smallest minority is the individual. It'll be all fun and games until we get a massively successful YouTuber who gets downvoted and tells everybody to go kick rocks because of it. Then if they bring that experience to YouTube, it will be devastating.
I think you misread what I said there. I didn't say it was the only benefit.
I don't think the drop in steem value can so easily be pinpointed. For the most part, it was the speculative bitcoin bubble that caused the receding tide to lower all the ships (cryptos).
That's crazy talk, that's assault and battery.
I think if BTC was still as successful as it was at its peak. Steem would still be more thriving. Problem is, it created a lot of false expectations.
We might be thinking about different markets. I think one of the markets is the token itself. So they created an incentive to buy the token, which is a bigger vote which translates to more rewards if you value and take pride in the content you produce. Self-voting is not "evil" I've seen self-voters who create high-quality content. If they have any sense of self-esteem and pride in their content then they will vote themselves.
I think this all depends on to what degree of investor you are speaking and if their self voting just to game it up. Or if they do appreciate their content and think that it is quality. It's not cut and dry.
Tell that to whoever coded in the ability for stakeholders to self-vote. Hey, they could easily code it out of the blockchain. They could code out self-voting. It wouldn't stop it from happening, I mean, people could easily get around it but.. It will make steem as a token immensely harder to sell people on. People don't even know what the hell steem is, to begin with. It doesn't make a lot of sense, with your philosophy you're going to have a really tough time selling people on it.
It's mathematically limited instant gratification for those who prop up steem's token value. Take away that instant gratification or the promise of it and I guarantee you'll see a decline in market activity. The reason we got the market activity we did was because of the ability to do the thing that you don't like to see people do.
You know what I think, and this isn't meant to come off rude; I think you're focused on the box from inside the box. That is to say, strictly focusing on rewarding content as the sole or only good, while I'm looking at the box from the outside regarding other matters. I'm thinking about why (or if) people will purchase steem, and how the success of selling the token equates to a larger steem value. Usually appealing to the instant gratification of the consumer is the best way to sell things. If a stakeholder is rewarding themselves, it means they're powered up. It means they are not selling the token to the market place. They are not creating downward pressure with their stake. Maybe they're not behaving 100% optimally, but this is still good for the value of the coin. This is part of the reason we need to fix trending so that people don't focus their envy on the free will of the stakeholders.
Say you know a millionare and you'd like to see'em invest a few million here. How would you pitch'em? Maybe this is something you should do write up the right way to pitch potential investors. How get the crabs in the bucket the right way. ; -)
This is what you said:
You use words which simply only recognize a single benefit. What other benefit is implied in your statement?
You imply that Steem's use case has no value, and it only has value, as do other altcoins, due to it's being a cryptocurrency like BTC.
I disagree. Social media has proved to be the most profitable business model in the world today. Steem, instead of enabling that business model, capitalizing on the technical superiority of the DLT to BTC, and the financial incentive the rewards mechanism creates (one of the most powerful incentives known), has instead completely devalued the society by allowing that financial incentive to be completely reversed by profiteering, dislodging users like spraying insecticide on a flea bitten dog. Steem isn't a shadow of BTC, and neither is any other altcoin of merit. It has it's own merits and faults, and the market specifically values it by those.
OK. Try to sleep on a park bench in NY. The cops will beat you until you go away. Until the SJW shilling began this century in earnest, that was the common solution to homelessness. Also, you just moved the goalposts. I was addressing the necessity of sticks, not advocating a particular implementation of social policy. I then go on to point out that nature deploys sticks that discourage dysfunction, such as dysentery. Are you going to argue that nature is unjust?
Your reply isn't even an argument against my point. You just move the goalposts.
You simply ignore everything I said and assume Steem only has value because it's a cryptocurrency like BTC. This is not an argument. It's moving the goalposts.
Again, you're ignoring that self voting decreases the value of the token. That's neither good nor evil, it just is the effect self voting has. You then state I have no self esteem or pride in my content. That's bullshit, and I reckon you need to take it back to restore my assumption of your integrity. You keep ignoring my points, because you don't want them to be true and drive you to agree with my conclusions. You will not arrive at a rational position by doing this. You may maintain your delusions by rejecting these facts, but that will not enable Steem to rise in value due to rational policy being implemented. It will enable you to be increasingly bitter as you cling to your delusions while Steem remains worthless.
No. You seem not to have experience investing. Capital gains is THE incentive that has driven civilization since prehistory. Profiteering, which includes violent raids by savages BTW, has continually been a drag on development. You seem not to grasp the opposite impact of these dissimilar practices, which I have repeatedly tried to explain, provided examples of, and I believe it's due to your continual undertaking to ignore what you do not want to hear.
The difference in skill between investors determines their relative success. The difference between investors and profiteers determines whether society benefits as a whole from their efforts. This is a fundamental principle and underlies all other aspects of civilization.
Experienced investors understand this principle, and thus are competent to contribute. Do you grasp the difference between corporate raiders and competent execution of a business plan that increases revenue from producing goods and services in terms of social impact? I haven't seen any sign that you do, and you always ignore this point. I haven't once mentioned morality or ethics. I point out the different impact of different practices, and leave the temporizing to you. Nonetheless you project on to me your conclusions of morality that you assign to the different effects I explain result from different actions.
Don't project that on me. That's all you. Since you dislike evil, and you account destruction of the value of Steem evil, you ignore evidence of the destruction the policies you support cause and accuse me of moralizing. That's not only disingenuous, it's dysfunctional. Stahp.
First, I do tell them this. Second, the Huey Long algorithm removes the financial incentive to do this, so it is trivial to stop it. Lastly, I have repeatedly pointed out that Steem does not attract investors because Steem is a bad investment, based on profiteering which investors intent on capital gains know is destructive of value. What we get instead are profiteers, who do not invest for capital gains, but to strip the value from the system into their own wallets.
You make this latter statement because you continually ignore the difference between profiteers and investors. The former destroy, and the latter builds. Builders aren't going to sink money in a platform controlled by profiteers. No one takes a long term stake in companies raided by Bain Capital Partners because it is obviously just stoopid to do. That is exactly the reason almost no one invests in Steem - except profiteers, and for profiteering purposes.
The only way I'd recommend Steem to someone who valued my integrity would be in a manner that addressed the profiteering issue. Until the profiteering ends, Steem will never be able to generate capital gains because ~90% of the value created by the content is sucked into the wallets of ninjaminers.
Get the crabs into the right bucket, or they'll get out. Steem is a broken bucket that the crabs successfully flee en masse. There is no incentive for them to be here, because that incentive is a feint in the White Paper, and the rewards that are claimed to be provided to content creators are instead extracted by profiteers.
Fix the actual problem, and I won't have to recommend Steem to anyone. Competent investors will flock here when capital gains are potential because they're always watching for opportunities.
I was highlighting the fact that the most obvious benefit of becoming a large stakeholder, is the ability to allocate a higher percentage of the rewards pool based mathematically on the percentage that you have powered up. There are other benefits too. However, they are far less tangible and harder to sell people on.
Steem has other value, and it's derived by its ability to mine people for creative content by exploiting human psychology as clearly indicated in the whitepaper. All stakeholders are benefiting from this. I'm not sure that's any more or less moral than those stakeholders who self-vote shit posts after they've realized what steem is doing and one's actual chances of receiving something of equal value in exchange for the time and energy invested.
Perhaps I misinterpreted what you were conveying. You can't argue with nature, as it's not an entity with a mind or the capability to reason. However, when it comes to your analogy about people who assault the homeless, there is a simple way of dealing with those kinds of people. It's the same way you deal with someone who tries to mug you.
I'll repeat the same answer as before: Steem has other value, and it's derived by its ability to mine people for creative content by exploiting human psychology as clearly indicated in the whitepaper. All stakeholders are benefiting from this. I'm not sure that's any more or less moral than those stakeholders who self-vote shit posts after they've realized what steem is doing and one's actual chances of receiving something of equal value in exchange for the time and energy invested.
I think we may have a fundamental difference in our perception of how the system works. I may be wrong, but as far as I know, the rewards pool inflation is calculated by the number of tokens that exist on the network. The only way to get them off the network is to burn them to null. So if you are a whale and you do a quality post, and you don't self vote it; you're not inhibiting inflation, you're merely not rewarding yourself. Someone else will get those rewards.
I think you have a misperception that your vote causes inflation. As far as I understand it, this is not true. Inflation is determined by the network supply, which was determined long ago. It only shrinks when people burn to null, otherwise, it's growing at a controlled rate. We don't have a very good sink. If you're not voting for yourself because you think you are inflating the currency when you do vote, then I can almost see why you're not self-voting as an investor. However, you are also a content creator, so if the self vote caused inflation as you seem to believe, you have just as much right to reap rewards as any other content creator. Also, I think you might be personalizing what I said, either that or I made a gross generalization. There are many areas in life where people can demonstrate that they have self-esteem. When it comes to the realm of content creation if you do a quality post and you know it then one way to demonstrate self-esteem is to upvote your content.
To the best of my knowledge, the rewards are a predetermined and foregone conclusion, aside from the very tiny amount that is getting burned to null. If you as a stakeholder invested in a slice of the pie, which will all be given away at the end of the day or week, then that's your prerogative. The act of altruism or self-sacrifice is not preventing inflation, not one iota. It only ensures that other people get those rewards.
Does my assertion self-voting does not create inflation change your position on this?
This might not necessarily be a bad thing considering some of the discoveries I made in the white and blue paper. And it depends on which you identify with more, the person who is going to eat the crab meat or the crab himself. We're all a little bit of both, some more than others.
Here is how inflation will work regardless of self-sacrifice. The only thing that influences these numbers is burning to null and it's effects are slim to nill.
I respond to what you write, not what you think while you write it. I can't know that. Your statement mentioned only one benefit, and that's what I responded to. The implication in your statement was not that other values exist, and particularly not that far greater values exist, than money. Society is far more valuable to you than the money you get from it - which would be worthless if society didn't value it at all. Society as a pool of individuals creates all the value that money has.
So, punish them for committing crimes? A stick, in other words. That's my point. Thanks for making it!
Which adds little to the conversation. Try to address the specific statements I make, which was what I was pointing out you're not doing. Repeating a faint nod to 'other values' doesn't begin to address what I wrote, even though it does acknowledge that there are other values.
What is it that makes social media the most profitable business model in the world? That value isn't financial emuneration, because the most successful social media platforms don't pay their users, something that should make Steem even more attractive as a social media platform, because peope like money. It's those pesky 'other values'. Even though they can get money on Steem for their posts, they don't stay here much, but stick to those other platforms that don't pay them money.
Clearly, those other values are worth more to them than the money they could make here.
Exactly. By allowing content creators to gain the rewards from their posts by not self voting, the whale allows the value of the content to push the price of Steem upwards, making the tokens they have worth more. That's exactly what I advocate, and exactly how self voting pushes the price of the token down. It's playing keep away with content creators with the value they create. Users don't like this, and go away. That shrinks the market for Steem, causing less bids for it on the market that does exist, and that causes supply/demand to lower the price of the token.
I am glad you grasp this principle.
That's not what I was referring to at all. You said the only people that don't self vote have no self esteem or confidence their content had value. I said that's bullshit, and it is, because I don't self vote and I know my content is valuable. Neither do I lack nominal self esteem.
You keep going on about inflation in response to my comments. This implies that inflation is the only mechanism that reduces the value of Steem, which is completely false. This failure to grasp that demand falling causes price to fall is preventing you from grasping that I am not talking about inflation, except as the source of the rewards pool - which I haven't addressed.
Inflation has nothing to do with these issues, and I think you're simply ignoring that. Again, ignoring facts doesn't make them go away. It just makes it extremely unlikely you can cope with them rationally.
You do you though.
Inflation is not the mechanism in question. It's destruction of demand. So, no, your assertion has no bearing on the matter.
Without the crabs, Steem will starve, because those crabs are the only source of crab. Inflation has nothing to do with it. Crabs staying in the bucket does. Payouts are a big reason for crabs to get in the bucket, but using twisted psychological tricks doesn't keep them in there.
Without the content, that's all Steem is.
Well, that content has value to folks, and that is because it benefits them. That makes it worth something to expend to get. None of that is exploitative, so casting it as primarily some twisted psychological trick is apparently simply a preface for justifying more twisted psychological tricks. This isn't necessary unless you're advocating using twisted psychological tricks, which I don't. Make a valuable product that is profitable. Steem is that product for Stinc, and since it's an investment vehicle, it's value can grow, which is what we want it to do as stakeholders.
That's really simple, and that makes it functionally robust.
I said:
"This benefit is not a benefit if they cannot upvote their posts as the former GUI had a tick box for."When I said "this benefit," it was meant to address that specific one. It's the one that I think most people factor in and give the most credence to before they move to purchase steem.
So the next time a LEO pulls you over for speeding, I'm sure you won't mind a moderate caning then? Sounds perfectly legit. My example is self-defense, whilst your example is an assault. Cops in a big city might be able to get away with doing something like that because homeless people are likely not able to afford to defend themselves. But I'll tell you what, if the cop peers at the homeless man's shoes and sees a pair of Bruno Magli's, he'll put down his batton and be like: "Sir, Sir, you cannot sleep here." If he gets some static, he'll arrest the guy, just as he should have done with the homeless man if he wasn't abusing his power.
Let's try this, just focus on the highlighted part to see another value that I think Steem has, the dinosaur social media has this same value. However, they have it to a lesser degree, because most of them haven't casinoized themselves yet.
I'll repeat the same answer as before: Steem has other value, and it's derived by
its ability to mine people for creative content by exploiting human psychologyas clearly indicated in the whitepaper. All stakeholders are benefiting from this. I'm not sure that's any more or less moral than those stakeholders who self-vote shit posts after they've realized what steem is doing and one's actual chances of receiving something of equal value in exchange for the time and energy invested.What you fail to acknowledge above is that many steemians are stakeholders and content creators too. So, if a generous content curator goes around and curates good content, then when they produce good content themselves that they are proud of and think is quality, then why shouldn't they curate themselves?
I said:
"Self-voting is not "evil" I've seen self-voters who create high-quality content. If they have any sense of self-esteem and pride in their content then they will vote themselves."Ehh, you kind of inverted what I said and personalized it. Maybe I could have chosen my words better to have prevented such a situation. I could have said that when I see someone do a high-quality post and then reward it with their stake that, it indicates to me that-that person has not only a sense of self-esteem but also takes pride in the content they produce.
There is probably a myriad of reasons that steem loses value. I think when stakeholders are downvoted, it can sometimes sour them to the platform, and when they sell, this creates downward pressure on the value of the token. Additionally, there is a disillusionment factor. For example, when people learn that some hang their reasoning on downvotes because proof of brain, which simply does not exist, that causes a loss of faith in the crypto. One more disillusioning factor is the blockchain casino gulag, which I mentioned in my other post. These are some major reasons in my mind as to why steem loses value to me. The prices are very low right now, and I have money to spare, but there is a certain poison about this newsteem atmosphere, one which prevents me from investing that money.
The bucket combined with the other crabs is the twisted psychological trick. Also, the whitepaper's use of the crabs in a bucket metaphor is not only horrible, but it is also very telling, the same goes for the casino metaphor. You do realize that gambling addicts end up losing everything in the end--and that crabs are boiled alive and eaten. It's the overlords that prosper, the casino owners, the large stakeholders, the ninja miners if you will. Lucky for me I have ulterior motives for being here, I'm using the gamification to tap into my ability to engage in content creation. My guess is nobody else will make a real killing on steem until there's another untethered BTC pump and dump. It will likely happen again, and when it does, the smart people are going to dump hard and fast, leaving new suckers to hold the bag. "Fool me once, shame on you."
Of course, the content has value, just as crab meat has value to the person eating it, and gamblers have value to the house who always wins in the end. However, most of the crabs won't get out of the bucket, and most of the gambling addicts will have their lives ruined. Some people go to the casino recreationally with 50 bucks and buy pennies, spend a few hours and go home with more, or empty-handed. That's a safe play. I came to this casino staked by the house, and I'm up big time in comparison. However, if I was here for the money and did a cost-benefit analysis, I'd conclude that it's an unprofitable time sink and that I was right not to invest those extra funds. On the plus side, I got good at the penny slots (content creation), and that's a skill that might come in handy on a more practical level someday.
All social media platforms undertake this ability. The only difference is that Steem enables folks to receive emuneration from this directly. Most platforms centralize that money instead.
Because, by the mechanism I have exhaustively explained, this reduces the value of the stake they HODL. That you still ask this question despite my exhaustive explanations, that you, as I have repeatedly noted, have simply not addressed, reveals that you do not understand what I have explained. Either you ignore what I say, are not competent to grasp it, or deliberately affect to pretend to.
It is therefore unlikely, after repeated attempts to provide that necessary understanding to you have been unsuccessful, continuing to do so will succeed. You have not successfully answered, or rebutted, or refuted my points in any way. You just either refuse to discuss them, or cannot.
No. You could not express this principle without it meaning what it does. I did not 'invert' what you said. It is simply what you mean to say that is false and insulting. I am not insulted, because it is false. I mention it because it's one example of how your thinking is muddled by basing your statements on falsehoods. A thing is true, or it is not. If it is not, then all subsequent statements based on that false premise are false, too. This statement is not the cause of your assumptions being false, but is based on factual misunderstandings that underlie both it, and all other understanding. Enabling you to grasp that it is false enables you to change your mind and become right. Were you interested in being right, you would take advantage of that opportunity to do so.
What did you do with that opportunity?
You simply reaffirmed your faulty understanding by rephrasing it, rather than correcting it. The words you use are but expressions of your understanding and beliefs, and merely changing the words you use to express false beliefs and mistaken understanding does not create factual basis for your statements.
What I have become completely certain of in this conversation is that you have determined upon a belief and are prepared to maintain it despite any facts that may prove it false. This is a common human trait. Study has revealed that people that deliberately deny facts to maintain their social membership are rewarded by a shot of dopamine when they do.
This is your brain on drugs.
Yes, and inflation is a minor one. However, you used inflation as a shield against discussion of the highly potent reason I have discussed, and this is disingenuous, appearing to be a deliberate ploy to divert the discussion away from points you want to ignore.
Such ploys do not increase understanding and development of reasonable policy, and this is why they are useful to people that intend to support their position, right or wrong.
Given that the greatest value of Steem lies in it's ability to enable people to self govern, rather than financially profit, I don't agree. It may pump and dump, but that is not it's most powerful attribute. When all the profiteers are gone, folks intent on voluntarist interactions will be able to use it to govern themselves by discussing and financially effecting policy.
In the meantime, it is relatively censorship resistant, which makes it far preferable to most other media for me.
I'm not even sure how you can state this with a straight face. User retention YOY has been shown to be somewhere around ~5%. That means that 95% of the crabs leave. That's how bad Steem is being implemented. That's the impact of profiteering. It destroys the endeavor it sucks the value out of.
That is why I proposed a mechanism that would remove the financial incentive to extract rewards that should be being invested in content creators. Until such a mechanism is successfully deployed, Steem will continue to perform at this level, because it is designed to facilitate profiteering, and that is utterly contrary to capital gains. Capital gains is what builds endeavors into successful enterprises. Profiteering can only destroy them.
Here we are.
Okay, I think you meant remuneration, and if so, that comes from us. They've got the worthless token, and we give the token a market value by buying into it. However, what we bought into does not have crowd wisdom, as shown in the blue paper, and is on par with gambling, as shown in the white paper. The average person is sold via word of mouth and doesn't realize it's on par with gambling until they get here and lose often enough to come to the realization. The main steem condenser is advertising now, and that's not getting kicked back to the users. The money goes to the STINC corporation, just as the other platforms do.
P.S. remunerate: means "to pay an equivalent for."
For most people, that is not what is happening here.
I thought I understood you in the last reply, I thought, that maybe you were under the misunderstanding that votes cause inflation. You said something which suggested to me that it might be your understanding. However, I guess you said it is not. It doesn't change the fact that even stakeholders are sometimes quality content creators too. If they highly reward content creators for quality posts, they ought to be able to do the same on their posts when they create quality content. Right now, for this post, if I had half a million steem, I'd give it a 100% upvote. I'd do it because I value my work, I'd do it because I know it's quality. If seeing a high-quality post get rewarded by a large stakeholder turns you off to the platform, or somehow diminishes steem's value, then I truly do not know what makes you tick or how you come to that conclusion.
Let us compare side by side, what I said, and how you interpreted it.
What I said:
"Self-voting is not "evil" I've seen self-voters who create high-quality content. If they have any sense of self-esteem and pride in their content then they will vote themselves."How you interpreted my statement:
"You said the only people that don't self vote have no self esteem or confidence their content had value. I said that's bullshit, and it is, because I don't self vote and I know my content is valuable."I did not say what you said I did. In my statement, the highlighted words are the people who I was talking about. As you've stated, you are not a self-voter, so how could this possibly apply to you? This leads me to conclude that you either inverted or twisted what I said, and then personalized it. I was kind enough to say that maybe I could have said it differently to avoid confusion. And apparently, you think that was a weakness, or that I am back peddling, I assure you I am not. Just compare what I said to what you said I said, and if you are honest with yourself, you'll probably come to the same conclusion.
I thought I was onto something. I thought I finally discovered why you were against self-voting, but you know what, I think I remember now. Your reasoning was stripped from the white paper, almost verbatim. It was the analogy about selling the machinery of the business. Yeah, that was it. However, what that fails to take into account is that many company owners, also work for the company. So, forgoing themselves their paycheck for the work they did, isn't necessarily an altruistic thing to do. It could be considered just plain ole stupid, especially if the business owner has a family to feed at home.
Think about it for a moment. If BTC pumps and old whales get out; The fact that they could sell to get out means that someone will be buying. The buyers will lose their ass when BTC dumps, and this means that many of them will manipulate the system in clever ways to try to accumulate as much steem as humanly possible. This, so when it pumps again, they can either get out even or with a profit. The problem will not go anywhere; You’ll just have new actors until the market reveals that the reputation of the system has destroyed itself.
I think the largest contributor to the impact of retention was the deflation of the BTC bubble, and if you want to take that one step further, that is probably what led to what you consider profiteering. However, you can't necessarily paint someone as a profiteer without knowing how much steem they bought and at what price or if they've broken even or not.
As always I appreciate your considered and substantive discussion. I have to admit I am frustrated by apparent intransigence, which I assume, rather than recognize that other people have had other experiences which lead them to different conclusions. I apologize for that frustration, and thank you for your tolerance.
Most folks do usually get something from a post. Last I looked the median payout is .04 SBD. While negligible, it's payment. It's not something you get from legacy social media platforms, and all else being equal, should be a significant incentive to post here.
Let me again show how this pushes the price of Steem down. The market for something is what assigns it's value. Self voting does not stimulate that market. It does the reverse: takes rewards that are intended to do so, as the OP reveals is the original intent of the devs, and sequesters them in the wallets of substantial stakeholders. I have referred to this as playing keep away with rewards, and users are discouraged by this behaviour. This drives away users, and decreases the size of the market. That reduces the number of bids for Steem, which reduces the upwards price pressure on Steem. Lower demand = lower price. This is the primary mechanism by which self voting, and all stake weighting manipulation, reduces the price of Steem.
It is contrary to the intent of the original conception of the devs of Steem, which was to reward content creators to encourage them to continue to market Steem by posting good content. Those posts are the word of mouth that brought us all to Steem. The payouts creators receive are the essential work product that is purchased by new users coming here. That is the payment for content engendered by author rewards: new users.
More users increases the number of bids, increasing demand, which increases price of Steem.
It is the reversal of this marketing mechanism by which profiteering lowers the price of Steem. Payouts to creators, whether substantially staked or not, encourages them to create content that increases the size of the market, which raises the price of Steem. However, by manipulating the rewards mechanism through stake weighting the rewards of authors are primarily extracted by substantially staked users - whales - and this reduces the incentive to creators to create, including and especially those substantially staked - which reduces the content created, reducing marketing, which reduces growth of the market, reducing price pressure.
In fact the terrible user retention exacerbates this negative price pressure, as new users that come here do not stay, and demand that once existed is reduced further, further decreasing upwards price pressure on Steem. 95% of users leave. The demand for Steem they produced leaves with them.
The only thing that gives value to Steem is demand. The solitary source of demand is the market, primarily users of Steem social media.
I provided examples of profiteering and investing for capital gains in legacy fiat markets. Two specific companies I named are Berkshire Hathaway and Bain Capital Partners. If you research these companies, widely known in investing circles, you will observe opposing business models.
Both companies seek undervalued companies, as all investors generally do. However, since a company is undervalued BCP simply sells off those undervalued assets at market value, and profits thereby. This is known as a hostile takeover, and BCP leaves a trail of defunct companies in it's wake. Other investors in those companies are not rewarded, since BCP purchases a controlling stake in the company which enables them to vote themselves all the proceeds of selling off the parts rather than equally sharing them with other equity holders. Of course this results in legal actions, which BCP drags out for decades and is simply a cost of doing business for them, which the time value of money reduces the more they can delay judicial resolution of tort actions.
I pointed out that this leaves employees out of jobs, pensions worthless (BCP simply defunds them), the communities out of the economic stimulus the unemployed no longer provide in taxes and purchasing power, clients searching for alternative suppliers, all in addition to the tort suffered by other investors.
Berkshire Hathaway, in contrast, does not sell off the forges and presses of the companies they buy, but instead improve whatever has caused the companies to be undervalued, increasing the proceeds of doing business with those assets. They profit considerably more than BCP, and Warren Buffet, who long lead Berkshire Hathaway, famously became the wealthiest man in the world by doing so.
The effect on society of BH investing for capital gains is entirely positive, in contrast to the destruction wrought by BCP. Employees get raises as they produce more revenue for the company. Clients are better served by the improved business practices BH undertakes to increase revenue and raise the value of the company. Communities receive greater tax revenue, and increased spending power of the employees. Warren Buffet famously remarked that he would prefer to never sell stock at all. BCP sells stock it has stripped of value for anything it can get, because it has used that equity to mine the value out of the company already.
This is the difference between profiteering, BCP, and investing for capital gains, BH. The former destroys companies and does this by extracting the value produced by business undertakings instead of allowing that value to remain in the token (stock), stuff it into their pockets. On Steem, the forges and presses creating value are the content creators, which cannot be sold. However, stake weighting enables profiteers to extract rewards for content into their own wallets. The only reason Steem still exists is that content creators cannot be sold directly by whales profiteering, and whales have only managed to extract ~90% of the value rather than eliminate it's source at a momentary profit.
This profiteering self voting exemplifies on Steem is destructive of capital gains, the community, and the content produced by the platform itself, resulting in trending being a pile of trash.
I am not going to bother detailing the positive effects of investing for capital gains again, as I hope that you will grasp from the above explanation of profiteering that the opposite effects are produced by the BH business model on Steem.
This is the central pillar of investing. Experienced investors have seen both models in operation. Steem is increasingly being optimized for profiteering, and investors know damn well it will not produce capital gains. Substantially staked investors are diversified. They have multiple investments and spend significant time managing their treasure, so stick to their knitting. They generally don't have a lot of time to read shitposts, or undertake to practice multiple business models, which learning how to shitpost and self vote, or the myriad stake weighting mechanisms on Steem. Substantial investors are doing well today. The stock market is reaching new highs all the time, QE is ongoing, and capital gains are trivial to attain for those that understand the market. Greg Mannerino can improve your grasp of investing in fiat markets if you want to know more.
Why should anyone with significant money decide to begin profiteering for chump change on Steem when what they're doing already is more financially rewarding, how they already do business, and based on an experience base so ancient it predates history itself? No reasonable investors come here, for these reasons, amongst others. Exceptions to the rule exist, and some people just want to profiteer because it suits their personality.
Profiteering and investing are opposites. One destroys, one builds. Your example of a business owner does not reflect the actual market. Such a business owner is an exception to the rule, perhaps seeking to retire, or staving off a hostile takeover from a similar profiteering entity to BCP.
The YOY retention issue has existed since Steem began, and is a direct result of the profiteering of the ninjaminers. During the BTC bubble it was about ~7.5%, meaning that 93.5% of users left. It's worse now, and gets worse every time a HF increases the ability to stake to extract rewards. You speculate on the matter because you have not researched it. @paulag undertook to publish the data, which I attended to when she did in 2017. The data is extant yet on the blockchain and you can review it at your leisure.
Profiteering vs. Investing. That's the whole of the issue in a nutshell.
You know that if 1 + 1 = 2 then 2 = 1 + 1. Math is just language. Words have the same effect.
I didn't misunderstand this. It's false. I am proof of that. Since you continue to stick by it, you continue to stick by something factually incorrect. If you want to be factually correct, you will have to change your mind. If you stick by what you said, you will remain factually incorrect.
You do you.
The frustration is mutual, and I too; thank you.
Negligible, as defined at dictionary.com is: "So small, trifling, or unimportant that it may safely be neglected or disregarded." It appears you are willing to give the median payout some regard, even though it is as you say negligible. Is this another way of conceding that remuneration is not what the average quality content producer is receiving?
Okay, I think we've determined that remuneration for quality content in most cases is not happening here. At best, the rewards are negligible. That said, If I'm a large stakeholder who also produces quality content, I'm empowered to correct that problem for not only myself but others too. I do not agree that this is manipulation but rather a stake-weighted rectification in a system that seems to operate without any rhyme or reason.
This is a very detailed answer, and I’m not sure that I can make all the same correlations and connections to Steem as you do. In the highlighted portion of your response, it seems as if though you disagree that large stakeholders are sometimes also quality content creators. Perhaps in businesses and corporations, it is seldom that the owner is putting in a 9-5 and collecting a paycheck. However, on Steem, many large stakeholders are also doing exceptionally quality posts. With stake-weighting, they can fix undervalued posts for not only themselves but also for others too. Are you suggesting that they shouldn't fix under-rewarded posts or just their own?
Hmm, I wonder if paulag's research highlights just how drastically the deflation of the BTC bubble affected the steem retention rate overall. Do you know if he investigated that factor?
Again, the "they" I was referencing was self-voters. I am a self-voter; however, I do not always vote for myself. So, when I post a video with no added content, I tend to decline payout, and this is because there is no work I added to it. However, as a self-voter, when I produce something I am proud of, I vote myself up. It is because I am a self-voter who has self-esteem, and I take pride in my work but not all of my posts. I can't even pretend to imagine why non-self-voters, especially those with large stake, do not reward their quality content. If I had to guess, it's an exercise of sheer masochism, cognitive distortions, or perhaps they think they're being altruistic and want to force everyone else into the same behavior trait. I'm sure there is a myriad of reasons why non-self-voters do not self-vote. As for you specifically, you seem to have a very intricate worldview, some of which I do not understand, and some of which I do not comprehend.
It's not enough to drive user retention, so it's inadequate for the purpose for which it is claimed to be intended. The average payout is ~1500% higher. The median is what most people get, the average is all payouts divided by the number payed. This reveals that a very few receive orders of magnitude more than most do. It's proof of profiteering, due to the factors that produce this effect.
It is why self voting is optimized on the platform, because ninjaminers are profiteers, not investors. I have to point out that what we feel about it is immaterial. Whether we feel justified in rewarding ourselves does not impact the price of Steem, except how it causes us to act, and those actions affect the price of Steem.
Profiteering prevents the price of Steem from rising. In fact this is why payouts don't reward content creators enough to achieve the goal of raising the price. So, self voting because payouts are too low is a self perpetuating cycle that can only spiral lower.
I do specifically address this. It doesn't matter if whales post in a functional system. The stake they possess has no bearing on the quality of their content. If they do post, given that they are well staked, it is ludicrous to suppose that median post payouts might compete with the ROI potential to their stake. However, using stake weighting profiteers are able to gain Steem using manipulation, which destroys the ability of curation to recommend posts based on quality, and extracts inflation from the pool that should be deployed to encourage marketing Steem to raise the price.
They gain more tokens that have less value by profiteering. This is the modus of ninjaminers, that did not buy their stakes with valuable money they decided to invest here, so have no incentive, no experience, to seek capital gains instead of profiteering. In fact, since they did not pay for their tokens, every scrap of value they can extract from their stake is essentially fabricated out of thin air. There's only 100% ROI potential to them. They cannot lose money if the price falls. There's no reason to impute investing competence to devs, and given the profiteering model optimized on Steem, it is strongly implied that they do not grasp that profiteering is contrary to capital gains, since capital gains is far more remunerative than profiteering historically. However they don't care, because any value they receive simply springs from the fact they created the tokens. They are not investors, and profiteering cannot cause them to lose money.
Ex: barbarians did not farm, did not build production facilities, but violently seized the wealth of those productive investors that did. This burden on civilization repeatedly destroyed empires, and as victorious barbarians tried to rule them, they gradually became investors, because they couldn't raid themselves to gain wealth, so had to produce it.
Such examples abound throughout history. Such seizure of wealth is ongoing today. I note that a hostile takeover of a factory in the Ukraine recently was effected with armed gangs. So it goes. Such profiteering always impacts society negatively, retarding capital gains. Steem should be protecting it's content creators from profiteering, but instead encourages profiteers to prey on them, and this produces horrible user retention and all that follows. It's counterproductive.
In timescales relevant, the transformation of barbarian raiders to investors for capital gains took decades, and usually generations. Profiteers on Steem aren't any different from barbarian raiders in terms of that learning curve and timescale. This does not give me confidence that the ninjaminers are going to fix Steem before they destroy it completely. Few examples exist in history of barbarians taking over an empire and not collapsing it, perhaps only Genghis Khan.
The ninjaminers are far more akin to barbarian raiders than the civilizations that rose from pastoral societies, because they just created all the tokens, and did not grow their stakes. Nothing indicates to me they grasp the dichotomy between profiteering and investment. I have been an accredited investor. I do not see that experience reflected in Steem code.
YOY retention has been pretty consistent during BTC's ups and downs. The difference between 7.5% and 5% isn't much, and the difficulty of determining how many actual users there are, dependent on various metrics regarding how recently/often accounts post and etc., makes it an estimate, not an exact number, because so many socks exist. How many? Who knows.
You'll have to look at the data and how it was derived to make those assessments yourself, as the pop of the bubble was after I was interested and attended to the data.
That doesn't acknowledge that your hypothesis included both self voters and non self voters. Your statement necessarily included non self voters as those that did not have self esteem or believe they did good work. All of the numbers in an equation are part of the equation. Your statement can be translated into math, which is what I was stating in the above line, and that translation would necessarily include non self voters.
Rigorous principles are necesssary to robust understanding. Understanding that self voting reduces Steem price should inform your voting. Preferring your own accumulation of tokens causes those tokens to have less value. It's not simply a zero sum game. While you or I self voting has little impact on the real world price, because we are not whales, I do not act contrary to my principles because I have integrity and am the change I want to see in the world.
Encouragement is not force. It's a carrot. Discouragement is a stick. Both are necessary, which is why I concede that flags are necessary to Steem. While flags are not force, they're as close as Steem provides. Steem is not separate from the real world. It's a subset of it, and real forces are no less at work here than elsewhere.
It is possible to accumulate tokens by self voting. This causes those tokens to lose value. It is not possible to gain orders of magnitude more tokens by self voting, but it is very possible for those tokens to increase in value by orders of magnitude, mooning.
The only way to moon is to seek capital gains. Profiteering will never, ever cause moon. Only encouraging the growth of the market can possibly do that. Should I self vote, who would not ridicule my principles? No one who cared about principles and my considerations. How much do I benefit from self voting? I dont even care, honestly, but it's certainly negligible. It's vastly more profitable to encourage other content than to seek a tiny increase in my tokens possible by self voting my tiny stake and delegation.
Okay, this little back and forth is getting out of hand. I'll reply to one of the things you said directly and the rest of it generally since we've started talking past each other in many of the replies on both sides. And you can agree or disagree with that, that's just my perspective on the matter.
What I said:
"Self-voting is not "evil" I've seen self-voters who create high-quality content. If they have any sense of self-esteem and pride in their content then they will vote themselves."The highlighted
"self-voters"was the party I had referenced, and when I said"they"I was referring to that category of people. People like me. I don't know why you keep thinking that song was about you, but I'm over it. You can believe whatever you want about that statement, I've done my due diligence with regards to conveying the meaning of the words I chose and why I chose them. If I wanted to suggest that you don't have self-esteem in the quality of your work I would do so directly. I have no qualms about telling people what I think of them.Moving on, whatever system it is that you are trying to envision, it's not going to happen unless you code it into the blockchain. There is no way that you'll force human behavior, even with downvotes, into any particular mold. I find your perspective largely incomprehensible, especially concerning the notion that people should only reward quality work when it's not their own. I mean, when you get a large vote from a power player on the blockchain, do you send'em a note saying that median posts cannot compete with the power of your stake. So please kind sir, unvote me, and revote at a prescribed value? Of course, you don't, because your self-interested just like everyone else is. I mean, if when a large stakeholder upvotes themselves at 100%--if this is some kind of injustice. Well then, it must certainly be an injustice when they upvote you at 100% too. (ツ)_/¯
I too type too much and sleep too little. So pardon me if I get cranky from time to time, just trying to be the most real me that I can be.
This is why I pointed to math. You can't just post one part of an equation and not the other half and still be mathematically correct. When you reference self voters, you reference non self voters by default. The only reason I pointed out me at all was because I am a non self voter. Your statement wasn't about me. As you point out, it was about you, and what I pointed out is that you are ignoring mathematical rigor that invalidates your position, because your statement was no less a comment on me than it was you.
It's because value is assigned by the market. You are not the whole of the market. You cannot hire employees and keep all the pay for yourself and expect them to work. You are part of the market, and depend utterly on the market to value your contribution. Self voting is effectively the same as fraud, kickbacks, and extortion in a free market.
It's why selling votes is illegal in political elections.
LOL That sounds familiar. Where have I heard that before ;p
Interesting idea. I have but recently developed the Huey Long algorithm idea, and it's permutations still ferment in the back of my mind from whence it came. I will consider that carefully, as it might well be something I should undertake, just like not self voting or buying votes.
Thanks!
Go with the Huey Long algorithm, there is no need to unnecessarily cause things to be harder on yourself in a market that doesn't meet your viewpoint on ethics. I have a feeling that to pull off the kind of thing you want to do, it would be best to start from scratch. Otherwise, you are changing the horse midstream. Not that they haven't done it 23 times already, but at least your investors would know what they're investing in. My only problem with your idea is that it might kill the motive to buy steem and or cause people to sell. These things are very wibbly-wobbly and timey-wimey, and if you don't strike the right formula, the cake doesn't bake. TBH I don't care what they do anymore. If they keep failing, it will fail in the marketplace, and that's how it ought to be. At this point, I'm thoroughly black pilled concerning the Steem blockchain; this is why free markets rule, they ruthlessly and effortlessly separate the wheat from the chaff.
Who is buying Steem that the promotion of capital gains might discourage?
Markets predate writing. Capital gains has proved to encourage investment and positive social development. That principle is sound, understandable, and proved since prehistory. I do not fear it won't work.
As to my sense of ethics, markets do not have ethics. It is not my sense of ethics that caused HRC to buy the nomination from the DNC, nor the lack of it that caused the ethical members of the market to vote against her. The market appears ethical because the individuals that comprise it are ethical, and the market for Steem reveals that my ethics appear to be the same as those in the market, because demand for Steem is not increased by financial corruption manipulating rewards comprises.
I don't want Steem to fail in the marketplace because it has some great features the market is yearning for, that the market values very highly. That it is failing in the marketplace despite these great features shows that it is being broken by very bad practices, equivalent to buying votes in a market that utterly reviles such corruption, and that is what I want to see change.
People bought into DPos, and that’s what they got. Meaning, the more tokens you have, the more influence you have over the network. That extra influence, regardless if it’s used to reward self or others, is a major selling point. If you take that and turn it on its head with a communized voting strength, then anyone who bought into the system because of the DPos gets short-changed. This is even more impactful if you do it when steem prices are low, and that’s because steem holders may never get a chance to break even in the market. This is especially true if people don’t see an incentive for buying into your particular flavor of utopia.
Demand for steem has not increased because many people realize that Steem's success is determined by Bitcoin's success. Nobody is certain if the dead cat will bounce again, and if so, how high. I don't want Steem to fail unless it deserves too. The market will sort that out for us. One right or wrong hard fork can make or break the desire for people to buy Steem. Whenever people are buying as opposed to selling, it's propping up the value of the token. Kill the incentive to buy, and you end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It all seems like a simple cause and effect to me. I wish the experiment could have taken place outside the influence of Bitcoin. Then people could have a better gauge of how hard forks influence the buying and selling of stake.
Turns out to not be such a selling point. Instead it's a vector for corruption. That's why we are where we are today on Steem. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It's broke as fuck, and needs fixing.
Steem is vastly improved over BTC as a DLT. However, it's so corrupt that that technical superiority, it's superb use case, and every advantage is outweighed by it's corruption, and is left simply a shadow of BTC, merely because it's a DLT.
That's about the crappiest outcome we could undertake.
The debate has been epic. Your participation is and was greatly appreciated. I left my final thoughts on this matter in a new post. Feel free to do the same if you like. Then perhaps, we can allow history to be the judge of who was more right, or who was less wrong. Hopefully, the BTC valuations won't muddle it up too much by creating false impressions. I won't reply to your last reply other than to thank you. So, maybe just some parting thoughts as opposed to any questions. I've expended far too much brainpower as is, on this topic, and I think I'm ready to move on and talk about the other stuff again. Thanks again, it's been funstrating!
Rational debate is it's own reward. I have appreciated the need to better express my understanding of these matters, and understanding your views.
Thanks!
Hey, @valued-customer, do you think you can point me to your proposal/post regarding the "Huey Long algorithm"? I am really interested to read your approach to solve the problem. Thanks.
It's simpler to just explain it here, rather than dig through my posts and comments to find where I have previously explained it. It's that simple.
Huey Long was a depression era politician, as crooked as any, but cagey too. He proposed that no one should subsist on less than 3% of the median wage, nor be paid more than 300%. This can be trivially done on Steem via code for author rewards.
The current median payout on Steem is about 1500% lower than the average, and this is proof that stake weighting is extracting ~90% of rewards via manipulating the rewards mechanism and getting those tokens into the wallets of whales instead of content creators. That median payout, about .04 SBD today is simply not enough to pay profiteers to manipulate the rewards mechanism(s), not even 3x that value.
It is demonstrably enough to keep some folks posting, because they're posting to get it now.
This simple algorithm forces stake to pursue capital gains, a rising token price, for ROI, and capital gains is the mechanism that has created civilization today, dating back into prehistory as an effective incentive to invest. Eliminating profiteering enables rewards to do what they were intended to do from the initial conception of Steem - encourage content to be created. Enabling creators to attain to the lion's share of rewards massively increases their motivation to do so, and posts on Steem are our marketing department. Folks see those posts and come here to read more. That's how we all got here, after all.
When the market grows, pressure on the price of Steem will increase as more people seek it. This will cause capital gains, and we all will benefit as Steem becomes the valuable money it was intended to be.
That's the idea in a nutshell. I note that Huey Long was assassinated not long after interest in his proposal began gaining popularity during the Great Depression. Thankfully, I am unlikely to suffer more than flaggings on Steem. Hardly even a discouragement, honestly.
Thanks for asking.
Edit: Geez I'm excessively verbose!
tl;dr limiting rewards on posts to no less than 3% nor more than 300% of the median payout eliminates financial incentive to extract rewards using stake weighting. As the profiteering is eliminated, the median will rise towards the average, potentially increasing by 1500%, as well as increasing the price of Steem.
I would add to this eliminating curation rewards completely, to increase the price pressure on Steem.
Thanks a lot for the explanation,
This can push profiteers to spread their votes but doesn't guarantee that they will vote for genuine users, the rewards mechanism could still be manipulated by the creation and use of several accounts to extract value and affect the median to facilitate the process of extraction. As long as there is a human factor in the equation, things won't work perfectly, we could think of something to mitigate the problem by making it harder and harder to manipulate the rewards mechanism, but we'll never solve it completely. Hence why investors may find that investing in STEEM is a foolish thing because they don't have the complete guarantee the value is being created and not extracted through manipulation.
Greed will consume this blockchain,
Limiting payouts on posts makes them unsuitable for extracting rewards on a commercial scale. No matter how many upvotes your botnet throws at a post, it will not payout more than 3x the median payout. This means that in order to gain substantial rewards, you must make many posts, which takes more work and cost more to do. Lorum ipsum posts are trivial to detect, and masses of posts from botnets are too. Flagging will swiftly render such easy to spot corruption devoid of financial reward.
Nothing is perfect, but this would be very strong incentive for whales to quit focusing on extracting the value from the content, and begin to seek ways to get that value into the token to create capital gains. That is what we want for Steem to rise in price.
Having extant stakeholders sucking the value out of the token is a strong disincentive for investors, which is why we don't get many. Having extant stakeholders focused on building value makes of them allies, not predators, to new investors, which will encourage them more, but not as much as the capital gains that will present a significant vector for ROI. That's what they know, that's what they look for, and that's what works historically to produce the largest gains of capital from investing.
At least without investing in hookers and blow, which presents far too much potential for capital losses than most investors might be comfortable with.
Nothing is guaranteed, and everything carries risk. Making this change will not make Steem an extremely conservative investment, and it will remain high risk. It will simply have a far higher potential to produce rewards for investors seeking capital gains, and that greatly levels the playing field with similar investments in technology they could make, and presently are making instead.
Greed is consuming the blockchain, which I don't want to happen, which is why I consider ways to use greed to grow the blockchain. I can't change or ignore greed. Stinc can make the blockchain grow from it, rather than be consumed by it, and that's what I advocate.
That'd be tremendously but what would we do without you.
Pick on someone else? =p
lol, okay Ralph.
I don't agree with everything here but this was a really thoughtful write up. I'm gonna chew on this a bit.
Reblogged for visibility.
Thanks @anthonyadavisii! After watching the video about
the wisdom of the crowd, do you think we actually have it?
Is it possible we are just pretending or have been gaslit?
Anthony's about half way up the hill. When he reaches the top he's just hoping everything stated above isn't a reality and he doesn't find himself on a study decline downward on the other side.
Translation: He's already passed gas; he still waiting to be lit.
(He's actually a likable even handed person but hey there's also the realities)
Translation: Ain't shit I can do about it even if I wanted to.
Somebody had her Snarkios this morning. 🥣 J/k :P
I did watch some of the video but a transcript would help. It's an important topic to discuss @sunlit7 and deserves focused attention.
I'm a bit backlogged after getting back from SteemFest so hopefully I can muster some time and energy to properly understand the arguments and reflect accordingly.
I still have a few other comments to respond to as well including yours. Thanks for reminding me!
Lol, you are so good natured.
This is a DPOS chain. POB was never supposed to be a thing.
I was vehemently against the separate downvote pool, but now that it's here it's working just fine and not going away.
One account one vote is not a solution. Just look to your own government on that front. It can't even be enforced without kyc. Impossible to enforce world wide.
The solution to this problem is a decentralized reputation system. One that doesn't take stake into consideration.
This chain is ripe with all kinds of unfiltered data we could be using to our advantage. If we want a better trending tab then we should just make one. The basic bitch algorithms we are using today will be laughed at in 5 years.
Dpos is working just fine. POB is simply an idealistic goal, and if I'm being honest it's working better than I expected.
Yeah, I only mean for content sorting, nothing to do with
rewards themselves. What if STINC's software was like:
So if the guy has sock accounts and he tries to
upsort the same post id from that IP he cannot.
^ It seems solid, I'm not sure how it could be thwarted.
I like that you brought up algos. What truffle pig is
doing, if it's real, seems like a helluvalot better idea
than what we're doing now for the trending page.
That system would be defeated using the same tactics that a DDOS attack is launched. IP addresses can be forwarded and spoofed. VPNs are cheap. The difference? DDOS attacks cost money, so adding a financial incentive makes the attack last forever (or until it becomes not profitable).
Also, the blockchain does not track IP addresses for a variety of many good reasons, so your whole plan rests on the shoulders of giving Steemit Inc full control centralized over the platform. Your ideas are much better suited for and an SMT or SteemEngine token.
You should get over the white/blue paper like I did. It's a pile of overzealous marketing trash. Truth be told I'm glad that is the case, as I like having the power of deciding where all my inflation goes. I don't need someone telling me they know better.
Arrgggh! - Thx for your feedback @edicted
"a pile of overzealous marketing trash." indeed.
Well if not that, content discovery algos maybe.
@trufflepig claims to be onto something smart.