The Solution To What Ails SteemsteemCreated with Sketch.

in #busy5 years ago

We read a lot about what is wrong with Steem. I am obviously overlooking the gripe sessions and referring to the serious posts that are pointing to specific problems to stimulate discussions which, hopefully, move us towards resolution.

One such post was made by @ura-soul yesterday. This covered how the "Proof of Brain" model is broken. Specifically, the theme was that bidbots eliminate the ability to see POB evolve. Instead, the trending page is bought and paid for. The belief is that the most interesting content would move to the top under a POB scenario.

https://steempeak.com/steem/@ura-soul/community-spirit-engagement-on-social-networks-is-king-for-steem-this-means-proof-of-brain-which-is-currently-broken

This could well be the case. I cannot dispute it. The question is "what is interesting"? Even without bid bots, couldn't a large account upvote, like Steemit, upvote a post to the trending page? Sure it could. Plus, what is quality? Or best? These are subjective terms.

The truth is the POB concept is built upon a DPOS blockchain. The core essence of the network is Proof of Stake. POB cannot get around this.

So what is the solution to this?

It is rather simple. Volume.

Consider this. We have 40K accounts transacting a day; picture that being 1M or 25 times the amount. What do you think happens to that daily reward pool? It gets diluted a great deal. Obviously, with DPOS, it is not a linear trade off, so we will not see posts payout go down by a factor of 25. Nevertheless, is it unreasonable to figure they will be slashed by a factor or 5-10? I do not believe so.

Under this scenario, we have a $10 post being worth a buck or two. The trending page will show payout of $10-$20.

Let us go one step further. What if we find 2M daily active users on here? Think that is outrageous? MySpace, which is a platform that basically died in the eyes of most, still have tens of millions of users. The truth is having a few million people on the internet is nothing.

At that point, we see a 50 fold increase in users on a daily basis. Again, if this doubles what we were dealing with before, we see the trending page equal to $5-$10. At that point, a 50 cent payout is very good.

Will this eliminate the use of bid bots? Maybe not but the incentive is decreased. We are also going to see many of these users attracted by the Communities feature which could also help to lesson the impact of the bots.

Ultimately, it all gets down to a numbers game. When there are a couple million people active and earning STEEM, that means the number of upvotes can increase a great deal. Sure, most of them have votes not worth much but it all adds up. Imagine having a post that get 15,000 upvotes. Even all their votes were worth $.0005 apiece (if that is even possible) that is still $75 when $10 might be considered a huge payout.

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Source

As an aside, bear in mind the $ here means S.T.U, not USD.

While we are at it, what about USD?

That is hard to tell since we know markets are their own animal. Logic would dictate that the price of STEEM would increase under this scenario. At what rate would it do that is impossible to figure. A 50x the number of daily users might result in a 100x in the price of STEEM; or it might net a 25X. Who knows?

Thus we cannot really focus upon the fiat currencies. Besides, by the time Steem has that many users, the ecosystem will be such that commerce on here will be priced in STEEM/SBD. There will come a time when our mindset will move away from pricing everything in fiat. Sure, we will have many things that still must be paid in such. However, that will diminish over time.

As was pointed out in the post, there are already interfaces that are blocking out the trending page and removing those that used the bots. There might come a time when paying for exposure is not getting the return desired. If the eyeballs are not there, it is tough to justify the cost.

Another thing that we are going to see happen is the influence of blogging on this blockchain will diminish. We will not have 1M or 2M bloggers on here. Instead, we will have people who are using the different applications, many that have nothing to do with blogging. Hence, we will see a lot of upvotes going to those in the communities on the different applications. That changes things greatly. Those people are not concerned about the Trending page or what is on it.

It is time to seriously consider what this place will be like with a million posts a day on it. Based upon the numbers put out by @penguinpablo, it looks like we average a post/comment per transacting account. How much different will these "problems" be with a million or more posts/comments being done a day?

Everything will be diluted to such a point that earning a lot of STEEM is not going to take place. We might see the average post get .01 or .02. There will be a lot with less than that. It is impossible to be any other way since the reward pool is fairly constant (actually it is shrinking with the inflation rate) and the number of users exploding.

Of course, this is where the SMTs enter the picture as a means to provide incentive to users. Nevertheless, if the price of STEEM follows logic, people with even a couple hundred SP will be very happy.

With activity comes changes. While they are probably not related at the moment, although I think more accounts are being claimed these days than before (I am at 73 myself). Let us look at the Resource Credit numbers as put together by @holger80.

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https://beempy.com/resource_costs

Over the last few weeks, the cost of doing things on the blockchain has dropped some. This is something I believe we will see continue as more activity takes place on the blockchain.

One thing I learned being on here, give things some time. Change does not happen as quickly as we like but it is taking place and we are moving in the right direction.

I do not believe POB is dead, in hibernation perhaps, but not dead. It is pre-mature to call that.


If you found this article informative, please give an upvote and resteem.

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So what is the solution to this?

An anonymous decentralized CAPCHA system.

Not for Steem-wide, but for specific platforms that really care about POB, that is absolutely perfect.

I think this will also be somewhat impacted as front-ends start to leverage the Hivemind upgrade which may make it easier to filter out those promotional posts. It will also make the Proof of Brain concept more visible for the communities that consolidate those interests and engage more actively. There is also the potential to see front-ends start setting nonweighted votes as part of the trending algorithm which could also do a lot of filtering.

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This is what I call interesting. Amazing job!

Volume will fix a LOT of things on Steem-Some broken, some not :)

At least in the foreseeable near term, more volume will equal more bid bot usage. The numbers you use are average (or maybe median) that more volume will tend to push down. The very top should remain near the same.

You are correct in that the next million users are not going to all be bloggers. This place has used and rewarded bloggers to build the platform, but to really grow, to become truly mainstream is going to require shorter posts such as "Hi How are you doing?" It is the way of it, I think.

The trending page, as it is, is useless to me. Who knew or could have foreseen that there could be as much garbage at the top of the heap as at the bottom?

I believe it will self repair at some point. The steps being taken right now, as we speak, are trending in that direction.

Thanks for a great post. Well thought and written, in a perfect world would have made the trending page. Someday...

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Nice write up post. For me, the question that kept bothering my mind is that which factor usually influence the rising and falling of steem price generally?

Markets are their own animal and with crypto, all coins tend to move in line with Bitcoin.

Okay. Now i understand. So bitcoin determines steem price right

It has been the trend but it does not mean it is guaranteed. Markets are their own entity and prices flow based upon buying and selling demands.

I wrote a comment on ursa and instead of going into a long drawn out comment again on here I think I'll just write a post containing my thoughts on bid bots.

A TLDR of it though is bid bots are a stop-gap to fill a current issue on the platform, but they are not the root of the problem. Fix the root of the problem and the need for bid bots will go away.

Thank you so much for participating in the Partiko Delegation Plan Round 1! We really appreciate your support! As part of the delegation benefits, we just gave you a 3.00% upvote! Together, let’s change the world!

@trufflepig does a daily post showing what the trending page would look like without bidbots and self votes. This is the latest that just came out:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@trufflepig/non-bot-trending-2019-02-08

@trufflepig also does a daily post of the "best" 25 posts that did not get good rewards. So far as I know, nobody with any power looks at that one.

Presumably, if we had millions of steemers here, some of those people would be coming with money, and so the rewards pool would grow. This is the focus of a few initiatives I'm involved with that are trying to get small, medium and large business to see the value of coming here to post their social media in a place with a good alexa ranking, dapps rankings, and fanatic users.

We have some success with getting those people to invest in steem and try. Often those people get killed for one reason or another, but hope springs eternal, and action creates results.

We read a lot about what is wrong with Steem

Only if that is what you seek. Most of what I see here are wonderfully creative posts by excellent bloggers, travellers, crypto-nerds and artists.

Thanks for calling @fitinfun! Here is a small upvote for this post and my opinion about it.

To my mind this post is at least 6 SBD worth and should receive 170 votes.

By the way, you can find TODAY'S TRUFFLE PICKS HERE.

I am TrufflePig, an Artificial Intelligence Bot that helps minnows and content curators using Machine Learning. If you are curious how I evaluate content, you can find an explanation here!

Have a nice day and sincerely yours,
trufflepig
TrufflePig

This post has been included in the latest edition of SoS Daily News - a digest of all you need to know about the State of Steem.

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