Distributing Wealth Should Be Equally Profitable

in #steem6 years ago (edited)

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  • The Steem protocol MUST distribute new STEEM tokens that are continuously created over time.

  • Users can and are encouraged to profit-maximise by fully using their allocated voting power everyday. This could be a mix from manually curating, trailing votes, selling votes, etc. (To clarify, everyone's voting power replenishes by 20% per day. To check, insert your username at the end of this URL https://steemd.com/@username)

  • There are only two distinct outcomes to voting: wealth accumulation (self-voting, vote-trading) vs wealth distribution (voting others, curating). There are other terms like selfish vs selfless voting, stingy vs generous. But I think they're ultimately not very good terms, since by trying to act selfless and generous, I'm also being selfish in hopes that STEEM's value increases over time through what I do as a voter.

  • Voting to accumulate wealth enriches a smaller group, slowing network growth. It encourages lower quality contributions, because less actual contributions are being rewarded.

  • Voting to distribute wealth enriches a larger group, speeding network growth. It encourages the better quality contributions, because more actual contributions are being rewarded.

  • Currently, it's much more profitable to adopt a voting behaviour that purely accumulates wealth vs distributes wealth. Why should actions that slow network growth be rewarded more than actions that accelerate network growth? Now voting activities on this network is converging to simple wealth accumulation, simply because that's where the money is.



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IMHO, Steem is operating like a premodern economy at the moment.
Images taken from Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.


  • Users are going to vote according to their own fleeting whims anyway, so the profitability of both types of voting should be more or less the same, instead of being vastly different. Wealth distribution activities should be just about as profitable and as equally risky to partake in compared to wealth accumulation activities.

  • When distributing wealth becomes as profitable as anyone using 100% of their own votes for themselves or their circles, maybe unnecessary spam filler posts and comments will reduce in the process.

  • At the moment, 25% curation rewards mean that voters only gain a small chunk of their vote's worth in return. The rest is given to others. Voting to distribute wealth isn't so profitable even on what voters think are the better contributions. Curation rewards are too low.

  • Test #1: Reduce curation rewards to 0%. This will obviously cause more wealth accumulation. There are no incentives to distribute wealth to others.

  • Test #2: Increase curation rewards to 100%. Maybe not obvious to some, but this is also encourages wealth accumulation behaviour no matter how anyone votes. Simply because it's 100% returned to voters and none is spared to authors. Quality of content / contributions are also expected to be much lower, since there are no authoring incentives on the table.

  • Test #3: Maybe all we need is balance. Increasing curation rewards from 25% to 50% may render voting activities a fair and equal risk for both wealth distribution and wealth accumulation behaviours. In the beginning, persistent wealth accumulation will still be most profitable. But rewards from curating good content now have higher chances of yielding better profitability. Plus, voters also know they're getting back ~50% of their votes, instead of only ~25% in this current setup. The effects are two-fold. Firstly, wealth distribution behaviour becomes less costly and less risky per vote. Secondly, this new economic scheme may sometimes provide better returns for wealth distributors vs wealth accumulators as more users take the fair risk to distribute wealth by curating quality content (could be through intermediaries like curation communities). So all in all, more voters are encouraged to distribute wealth because it also has the potential to accumulate just as much wealth for voters at the same time.

  • In effect, we could use an economic model that renders both voting behaviour equally profitable, statistically. Maybe this is the equality that our community should be focused on. The network may have a better chance to improve when more users are persuaded to distribute wealth as well, instead of purely accumulating. The only way to do this effectively is by making wealth distribution activities more profitable, maybe to the point where it's synonymous to wealth accumulation. Curation communities should be just about as profitable as vote bidding communities, if not better.

  • Finally, why is slight superlinear reward curve maybe necessary? Firstly, to reduce unnecessary spam. Secondly, slight superlinear makes it necessary for all voted content to have a minimum of at least one other peer validation from higher SP users in order for more substantial wealth to be distributed, unlike zero validations at the moment. Thirdly, to congregate and amplify the best and worst voting behaviours for community self-regulation, instead of having them distributed flatly and widely like what we're experiencing on the network at the moment. Fourthly, to make vote bidding price discovery less predictable.


Let me know what you guys think! Am I making any sense?
Follow me @kevinwong

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i agree with you curation reward is much low..if it will increase 50% it will be very helful to distribute wealth among the community and selfishness will much reduced on this platform,,,steemit inc should considered your opinion...it sounds realistic and helful for the community.

I agree with most of these points and have raised them a lot of times myself.

I'd rephrase wealth accumulation vs wealth distribution. I'd view it as voting behavior that's content agnostic (eg. vote selling, self voting, delegation market etc.) which undermines the content discovery feature of the platform, and voting behavior that's content reflective (eg curation) which adds value to the platform.

I entirely agree that the economics should be altered to allow the latter to be competitive with the former, while still leaving enough rewards on the table to incentivize good content creators.

Something like modest superlinear, 50% curation, slightly increased downvote incentives and slightly less top heavy curation curve would be ideal.

Do you think content discovery is hindered by the fact that there is a trending page? I mean if we do away with the trending page and just have the hot page instead (which I believe has a shorter time frame so more likely for new good posts to appear), and maybe add a recommender system base on what a user post or voted previously, would that improve the content discovery aspect? I know this is side tracked from the voting discussion but it just popped up in the mind.

Yeah hot is much better!

Good to see, some whales of the community still think about betterment and growing with the minnows like us. If you guys make the right move, we will follow you there. For better community and giving the equal opportunity to all.

I rather think this idea has the potential to kill the community. 50% curation rewards mean nothing positive for a minnow. This only effects a few current top curators in a positive manner, everyone else would be drastically worse off.
whale/minnow ratio is such that those few large accounts that would curate more due to this still wouldnt be able to make any positive change to wealth distribution. Quite the opposite. This would mean more wealth accumulation in the hands of the wealthy. Taking away from the authors and giving to those that have large upvotes.

This really wouldnt benefit anyone but the few top curators like Kevin or large SP holders.

It's inaccurate to equate the proposal to "taking away from the authors and giving to those that have large upvotes".

Its rather a figure of speech or its a lapsus from my part in explaining my position. You arent "taking away", but you are creating a system that is even more focused towards accumulation of wealth in the hands of the wealthy. I dont think that should be the case.
The problem here is the stake based reward system. I have high hopes for SMTs and their 1 account/ 1 vote system Ned intends to move towards.
It has its own problems, but maybe then we wont need to rely on whale support. If SMTs werent a thing i probably wouldnt be giving my critical opinion on a large account like yours. haha. :D

No one can tell if you're a dog or cat on the internet, even the blockchain..

edit: and extrapolate a few years down when most people aren't gonna give out their votes.

Well it was nice talking to you, regardless if i agree or not. Off to tell Grumpycat he is wrong about something. See how it goes. hahaha.
See ya round. ;)

Lol btw to clarify, I'm liking that 1 account / 1 vote system as well. It's value, security, scalability etc will depend on use case.

Kev, i read this post linked below. I think you might find it interesting. Its not really connected to our convo, but since you are a manual curator im pretty sure you will find this very "frustrating" if you arent already aware of the practice.
See ya.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@firedream/another-way-of-milking-the-system

Don't mind trying this out. Even burgers can evolve and become better.

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The answer is simple, at least to me.

Change the stupid mechanic of first voters getting more curation, just have it be determined by the vote values. Remove the pointless 30 minute scaling curation and make it 0 minutes.

50% curation/50% author reward. This should be self-evident in how it will encourage large SP holders to be forced to shitpost less.

Also, make curation and authorship give the same TYPE of rewards. It is banal to say the least to have curation only give SP while authors have the option of liquid SBD. Give both options to curation as well, or have both only give SP.

Some tweaks to power down time (probably shouldn't be 0 days, because hacking could be far more damaging to users) will also make powering up seem like less risky of an investment as well compared to straight trading STEEM.

I love the initial premise. I'm not so sure about the solutions though. In the end there is always this paradox between the ability to self vote and the ability to create multiple accounts, it seems that if you try curb one, the other will be abused. More strict registration where we had to use our IDs and could only create 1 (or a limited amount of) account(s) would solve most of steemits issues, but I really love that we are free to remain relatively anonymous here so I am not pushing for that.

The only other solution I can think of is to basically do as you propose in your general assesment of what should be done. We should be making more of an incentive to spread wealth, by both changing algorithms and the general tone and culture of the platform through our own will to do so.

But you still run into problems with higher curation rewards. People currently curate content based on their perceived ability to profit from it, which means that wealth still floats back to a few people rather than becoming more distributed. Very few people curate with the intention of helping undervalued content get seen or spreading wealth and there is soooo much undervalued content at steemit, despite how much crap content out there.

Problems sometimes take a long time to crop up cause many of our large stakeholders have the platforms longevity and the benefit of others in mind and are generally decent people like yourself. But what happens when a new class of shit curators level up their game to profit from increased curation rewards? I think there are already problems with 25% rewards for curation, they'd likely get much worse by changing that to 50%.

Has anyone talked about voting for curators the way we vote for witnesses and allowing curators to profit that way rather than directly though a percentage of what they curate? It's not a problem of curators making too much money, it's a problem of the method in which they are paid, through a percentage. We could set reward for curation to 0% and allocate 25% (or even 50%) of the reward pool to curators through a voting system similar to witnesses. If large stakeholders didn't want to do curation themselves, they could hire curators to use their stake for them, and they would be judged based on the curators they chose. People would surely vote for acidyo and curie as top curators and they could share some of those rewards as payment to the curators, whatever was agreed upon.

I honestly feel that every whale should be encouraged to have a manual curation team working for them like @acidyo does in order to make the most of their stake and if they don't want to bother with the work, they can just pay others to do it for them. And they should be rewarded handsomely for doing a good job at it and not so much for doing a half assed job or for taking advantage of the system.

What do you think?

EDIT: Turned this into a post, if you like the idea let's spread it
https://steemit.com/steemit/@whatamidoing/why-don-t-we-set-curation-rewards-to-0-and-vote-for-curators-the-way-we-vote-for-witnesses

This seems like an idea that ONO is proposing, where "super partners" are voted whose responsibility is to curate posts (but by blocking bad quality posts instead of promoting good quality posts), and in return they get extra tokens for their work.

Sounds like they can create jobs for themselves though (by being the spammers themselves)

Hmmm, I didn't realize that, but I guess it is not all that different. I would be much more into ONO if people were answering some pretty reasonable questions I had about how it's going to deal with "free speech" issues that are bound to come up...particularly with where it is based.

It gets a head start in China. It'll have 75 quintillion coins go to their team and their best buddies while everyone else fights over 5 quintillion coins a year. What's not to love about taking 15 YEARS for everyone else's equity combined matching the founders' share? :p

Hahahhaa is it that bad? That’s hilarious. Ok, interest waning...waning...waning....

To put it mildly, I am not the bot you want in any thread about ICOs being hyped. xD

In the end there is always this paradox between the ability to self vote and the ability to create multiple accounts, it seems that if you try curb one, the other will be abused.

I’m already working with the absolute minimum effort voting behaviour for returns, so not even denying anyone of selfvoting, creating botnets. Even identity based voting can be exploited. Fully embracing stakeweighted voting here on an open network environment and just wanna encourage more users to give votes away. And only way to do it is to increase curation rewards, which could also in turn make actual curation services more profitable and hence, desirable.

I still don't see how that won't encourage people to just keep voting on the same 10 authors or posts from users who use bidbots. I hope I'm wrong.

But in any case, your effort however minimum is greatly appreciated. :-)

I agree with you, trying to make higher incentive to upvote good content and less incentive to vote on your own comments is a good way to start. This will definitely increase the quality of posts on Steemit.

I remember when my vote cost less then a cent it incentivized me to upvote posts that I really liked and considered good quality. Because the incentive to upvote my own content and other peoples content was almost equal.

@kevinwong, did you know that me and my team are trying to make Steemit more popular by creating a completely free and good looking mobile application called SteemApp. Would be awesome if you could consider voting for us as witness. This will really help us move forward with our project. Thank you in advance. I see that you really care about Steemit, considering what you wrote here in this post.

You are making sense
@keviwong i love the whole idea and concept you put in place while writing this post. From what i have understand so far on steemit, the only recognised and generally accepted way of accumulating and distributing wealth is actually from the community curators.
E.g curie, ocd, sndbox, steemstem, e.t.c.

This community have applied the rules i called satisfied quality movement, though there have been a lot of sacrifice while making this happen.

It will be very lovely if you can create a community. while you make a quick test run, by giving power to new set of people who have passed your test. There is a saying that chains are not made with a single string, but with a combination of string.
Create a string, while you let them create more string, with all your goals will be achieved without limit.
Cheers!

It would definitely be nice to see curation and quality content be assigned more value in the community @kevinwong. Whatever a person's approach to Steemit may be (content creation, developing apps, maximizing profit), I think we have to consider that the Steemit social site is somewhat like the Steem tokens "Store Front Window" to the world. And if we're presenting the world with CRAP, that hurts everyone's investment, in the long run.

I agree with most of your points, simply from the perspective that we need to "build a better carrot" (incentives) rather than penalize anyone.

However, there's a big BUT here...

The content discovery process — itself — is a stumbling block when it comes to curation on Steemit. We're two years in and that's great, but how to find good content that also interests us remains a bit of a mess. At the very least some kind of "category tree" needs to be implemented...

Just like someone doesn't go on eBay simply to "look at auctions" the incentive to actively curate on Steemit is low because... well, let's say I'm interested in "psychology." If I could be directed to the posts that are ACCURATELY under that heading, I would actively curate. But that's very difficult. People mis-tag, and tags are not even static; I sometimes wonder how many "orphan" posts we have because of typos.

My point here being that some organizational tools — at the code level — would also help curation/content discovery on Steemit, and at least make it more enjoyable (an "incentive") than it is now. I know, "communities" have been promised... but they still seem like so much mist in the air. What will they do? When will they be implemented? Will they serve the right purpose? Will they actually organize the site? Or will they just be a vehicle for Ned and STINC to promote their beloves SMTs without having a material impact on functionality?

I realize that I have taken a bit of a sidetrack from your original post, but I think a consideration of the content discovery process belongs with a discussion of curation!

=^..^=

Ideally, it would be great if users voted for the content they like. Don't think about the best time, not thinking about the potential profit. And Yes, getting the author and curator 50/50 profit seems reasonable and fair to me. To exclude selfvote, bots. It would be great if it was the quality of the content, not the reputation or the magnitude of the SP, that was a priority on the platform. Just like it was meant to be. But the human factor, greed and temptation of easy money as always destroys an ideal picture. Reforms are needed now. Very interestingly, that will come out of this. I think that freed from the garbage, spammers, and fans of fast profit platform to transform. There will remain only those who really live it, who are ready to work, share their creativity and lifestyle. Those who are sure that for the sake of profit it is necessary to work, instead of just to break a jackpot, as in a casino. Maybe it's utopia. But I would like to see such an Steemit.

partially agree, more and more some riches are getting richer who earn steem/SBD.. fortunately or unfortunately.. Steemit is so similar with real life..

It is called a DISTRIBUTED network. If we don't revolutionalize meaning and value into economics, it will stay the warped and dismal science that extracts wealth from the populace through its internally dystopian logic of human nature... we need a system for the FUTURE , right on bro !!

PE AC E ! !

Interesting writting indeed! I’m not that favorable of any set percentage numbers. In this smart era maybe a solution would be some kind of a “smart” self adjustable dynamic percentage system that takes into account the behavior of the poster (e.g. is he/she a heavy self voter, votes mainly only a closed circle...)

Yup I'm in this school of thought too (regarding dynamic systems, there's no point measuring voting behaviour as that can be easily played around with). Maybe should just oscillate between 0% and 100% every month, make it exciting ;)

Hehe, true! Making it more Vegas style ;)

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