RE: The HoboDAO Contests Begin!
Excellent!
I'm about to go to bed, so I'll just start with point one and leave the rest for tomorrow.
Point one is this: in hf21, niche content suffers disproportionately from the new curve. If I like something but I know it's not widely popular, voting for it is the economic wrong choice. It's going to be way down on the rewards pendulum, so my otherwise $0.10 vote is worth only $0.05. It under-rewards the author relative to my stake, and if I'm trying to make good choices for curation and play the game of honest curation you're promoting, I'm going care that I get less in curation rewards, too. I can instead sponsor that user for SBI and get 50% curation, and know that I'm giving them the same value as if they were posting about things that were mainstream popular. I think of this like the subscriber model on Twitch.
That's use case 1. Feel free to respond, but I'm going to bed and will write more tomorrow.
Give me a high level quick explanation with how it works first
Circumventing the rewards curve is precisely something we don't want people to be doing. Every post goes through that dull period at the start where you're getting half rewards. How would a process that circumvents this be seen as fair?
Well, as even supporters of the rewards curve have noted, one of the unintended consequences of the CLRC is the lower rewards to non-abusive authors. Many users will not ever get posts above 40 steem, not because they're posting junk, but because of a ton of factors that have little to do with quality: the small target audience, the large target audience of small users, whatever. So I think a whitelist of users who are at the bottom of the curve but not abusive is a good idea, and I think SBI helps those users stay invested in the platform while they build an audience that will boost them above the 40 steem level or if they're a consumer and will stay small forever, so that they can have a lasting impact on other users.
And that's only one use case of many.
But that's not the discussion you want to start with. You want the nitty gritty technical economics, right?
I'll do my best, though @josephsavage is the economist behind the program, so he not only understands the working parts behind the program, but has an even deeper understanding of the economic impact of SBI throughout the steem ecosystem. Tagging him here so he can explain better.
Here's what I do understand.
A sponsor sends 1 steem to sbi with the name of someone they want to sponsor into the program. Assuming neither user is on @steemcleaners or @buildawhale blacklists, SBI begins a tally of rshares (see @steembasicincome for math)
SBI uses that Steem to purchase delegations on dlease.
When the rshares tracked rises above the dust threshold and then some, they use a vote on the curated author and sponsor's most recent post to send that value.
It takes approximately 2.5 years for 1 SBI to accumulate 1 Steem, so it is not a program for short-term gain.
While convergent curve has the negative side effect of hurting lower payout posts, it's necessary for the intended consequence of bringing all profitable behavior into light. If you attempt to circumvent it, you're putting yourself at greater exposure to downvotes, and it comes at the cost of an honest distribution of votes by intentionally funneling votes into one post to beat the curve.
You've also described precisely an elaborate vote selling scheme.
Money that someone has paid going into a pool that leases SP to vote on posts authored by an account nominated by the initial person who paid the money. This is content indifferent voting. There's really no other way to look at it.
White/blacklists/standards don't do anything in a vote selling market. They're either just empty virtue signalling so they don't do anything, or they actually raise standards and in doing so, get out competed by those who don't. Bid bots like the one you mentioned understand this perfectly well.
Whether you know it or not, you're part of a scheme that's undermining honest curation here.
I don't understand what you mean by this sentence.
Would you elaborate on your idea of a vote-selling scheme? And/or "undermining honest curation"? When I sponsor someone, it is because I have read their content and have chosen to support them. Is that not honest curation?
It's also not content-indifferent. I, a real person who has read some content, want to support the author of that content.
Perhaps the disconnect between our perspectives comes from how we consume content. I like particular authors, and I subscribe to them. It matters to me, the whole of their body of work, what they've done before and what, based on that, I can expect from them in the future. You presumably read whatever happens to be in front of you at any given moment, and find what they've done before or are likely to do in the future irrelevant?
Forcing all profitable behavior into the light is just the curve making it difficult for exploiters to hide their farming or circle jerking activities in micro voted comments and avoid scrutiny and possible detection from free downvotes. Basically if you're farming 10c comments all day, you're losing so much money to the curve you might as well just vote honestly. That's the intended effect of the curve.
You may not be using the scheme in a content agnostic way, but the scheme itself is indifferent to how you use it. If someone sponsored a bunch of their own new alt accounts and produced dull but perfectly coherent content, they get to enjoy votes they effectively paid for; votes that wouldn't have gone their way otherwise and votes that are content agnostic. This is why I'm against the scheme.
Honestly improv, the best way to support an author you like is to just vote for them. Or you can send them a little bit of money if you wish, as a tip. Paying for them to get a vote either directly (eg bid bots) or indirectly (eg this scheme) usually results in some price that needs to be absorbed by the system. Please have a think about it.
I do think about it, and thank you for your respect in this conversation.
I know this is important to you. And it is to me, too, because I think @steembasicincome is a force for good on the platform, a force that lifts up poorer members of the community, and is not the same as a bidbot.
You are concerned about the possibility that people aren't using it like its stated intentions, that they're sponsoring alts. I don't think that's a thing that happens with this project. I think SBI does a good job of making sure no one can do that.
My experience with it, which goes back to nearly its inception, is a tremendously positive one. It's usefulness building support for projects like freewritehouse has kept those projects growing. It's useful as contest support, because it helps people who are engaging on the platform stay engaged. And, of course, its mission to provide a basic income through the power of Steem, I think is a worthy one.
I acknowledge that it's so lofty a goal that it might be met with skepticism. But because of that goal, they do a few things. One: it's built sustainably. No one gets to say, "here's a sum of money, now upvote this post for that amount". Rather, it's a lifetime investment. Also, there ARE finite resources, so buying levels for yourself would be considered an abuse.
Two: you have to sponsor someone else. You will never get as large a personal return as you would by behaving selfishly. You must be willing to lift up others in the community.
Three: the people behind it work hard to make it a force for good. They support community-enriching projects by sponsoring them into the program themselves. It is run by people trying to make the world a better place.
Anyways, I hope you'll do more research into it. Don't dismiss SBI as just an elaborate vote-selling scheme. See the impact it makes. See the projects that use it. Evaluate how much good (or bad, if you come to that conclusion) has come of its efforts.
And thank you for the respect. It means a lot.
that was quite an interesting negotiation. Rarely see it in this quality here.