Five ways your self-vote can earn 100% or more under HF20.

in #steem6 years ago (edited)

The HF20 early voting penalty change will remove one of the most powerful methods for getting more than 100% value from your self-vote. But many of its proponents seem to think that removing this one particular issue will somehow cap self-voting value at 75%. They're wrong. Here are five ways it will still be possible to get at least 100% back from your vote.

1. Be the first voter on your post at fifteen minutes.

Votes after fifteen minutes still earn full curation rewards, even if they're self-votes. So if you're the first voter on your post, you'll generally get 75% of your vote returned to you as the author, and at least 25% of your vote returned to you as a curator. This value increases based on how many more votes you get, including bought votes, and the effect is large enough that it will be very possible to earn more than 100% even if you have to move that vote to ten or twelve minutes to get in first.

2. Be the only voter on your own comments.

As long as you wait at least fifteen minutes, as long as you vote a comment that no one else does you'll get a pure 100% return: 75% in author payout and 25% in curation. (Although you lose a little bit of the extra value the broken SBD peg would give you on an instant vote now.)

3. Qurator

@Qurator's tier system allows users to upvote their posts and get a larger upvote from their accounts in return. Going from Tier 0 to Tier 1 gets you 35c in extra votes per week, no matter how tiny your own vote is, which can lead to returns in the thousands of percents for plankton. At the high end I give them 36c in votes per week to go from Tier 2 to Tier 4 and get 91c in additional votes in return - after curation a value of around 250%.

4. Steem Basic Income

Getting a greater than 100% return on your vote to @steembasicincome takes some more math, some starting capital, and a willingness to live with the long investment horizon of regular investment in the program. But once you've done that the voting bonuses can be great. I have a test account that is currently trading 5c/week in its outgoing votes for $1.35/week in votes from SBI, and percentage-wise it gets more curation than it gives up, leading to a return over 3000%. My own account currently earns in the neighborhood of 200% on 70c/week in votes.

5. Make-a-Whale

@make-a-whale is a limited-slots project that requires 500SP to join, but if you can get in it returns well over 100%.

More out there

The latter three just happen to be services at the top of my mind right now, there are more out there. They're more minnow-and-dolphin-level programs, I'm not sure if there are super-private whale versions as well. But whales can always use the top two methods no matter how large their votes are.

These three are able to return more than 100% by using the power of exponential account growth combined with the profit from leasing delegation.

Conclusion

While it might be worthwhile to close the early-voting-penalty loophole and stop authors from getting quite as much value from their self-votes, reducing it below 100% will simply cause those who are primarily return-focused to move to other, readily-available strategies to earn 100% or more. The HF20 change will certainly not cap self-voters at 75%, or even 100%.

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You are clearly a gifted thinker. Please keep it up.

It won't do us any good to keep thinking up new rules to prevent self-voting unless we also think about how the profiteers will game the new rules.

Can we start with a new premise and see where it leads? I propose that the people who are generating junk posts and upvoting themselves do not want to generate junk. They want the profit, of course, but they don't want to have to make garbage posts in order to do it, that just happens to be the most efficient way to get the job done. If we could give profiteers a way to earn bigger rewards by delegating STEEM to reliable, honest, human curators, then they would do that. Even the worst rewards pool rapist would prefer to invest STEEM, passively rake in rewards, and post pictures of their goldfish if they could.

I think that the first, and easiest step, to fixing the problem is to rebalance the rewards system so that curation earns more than it does now. Right now, everyone is incentivized to post something even if they have nothing of value to contribute. It would be much better if more people were incentivized to do manual curation. Shifting the rewards toward higher curation rewards is a modest first step in fixing the combined spam/self-vote problem.

The second piece of my proposal is half-baked, I know, but maybe you can help me with it. I want to imagine a delegation system that allows me to delegate voting power and share in the rewards that come from the use of that voting power. I also want to have a way so that I can easily see how my delegated voting power is being used. If I earn good rewards from delegating my voting power, but it comes mostly from upvoting crap from a spammer, then I want to know that. Finally, I want to make it so that witnesses are selected using a system that combines curation of good content and satisfactory operation of a witness node. The witnesses should be elected by accumulating delegated voting power that they are responsible for re-delegating back to curators.

In the end I want to make a system that makes it easy for me to delegate voting power, earn a profit from the use of the voting power, and also have a way to see if my voting power is being misused. The result will probably be a tremendous accumulation of power in the hands of the witnesses, but I think that is risk that is mitigated by the fact that every day is election day on Steemit. Imagine a scenario where you could examine an over-rewarded post and could see which one of your trusted witnesses participated in the up-voting using your delegated voting power.

In short, I think that we would be better off if curation was better rewarded and witnesses were responsible for curation rather than just node operation. To make that happen, we need a more sophisticated delegation system that allows voting power to be delegated and re-delegated in multiple steps but also allows for the rewards associated with the exersize of that voting power to find its way back to the STEEM owner.

This is really interesting, and I'm going to need to take some time to think about it. My first thought is that it's overloading the witnesses a bit and might be able to be done independently by users who are interested in it.

Some of this reminds me of the @thundercurator project, and some of where it seems @ocdb is intended to go. But you might be looking for more of an outgoing curation that finds its own content rather than having people submit.

Nice article, The main issue when it comes down to self-voting is excessive self-voting without giving anything back to the community. I'm a member of all 3 "upvote groups" you talk about and getting some guaranteed upvotes from them on my daily post really makes a huge difference.

The way I am calculating the retuns though, they actually offer less compared to 100% self upvoting. (I can add some numbers if you want). I have been thinking about possible solutions to make a scalable and fair upvote group for a while and have been testing it out the past month ( @upvoteshares | @minnowshares ) Feel free to check it out and scrutinise all the numbers and give me some feedback!

The way I am calculating the retuns though, they actually offer less compared to 100% self upvoting.

Compared to now or after the early voting penalty is changed? The way it is now a minute-zero self-vote on a post earns way more than 100%, no matter what, and hundreds of percents if you're intentional about it. But that's an exploit, not a good baseline.

The baseline for me is what you get back if you're the only one to vote. (Mostly self-voting comments.)

I'll take a look at your projects.

I was indeed talking about compared to now. I haven't taken a really close look yet on how things will change on HF20 aside from the basics.

Self voting comments as you say will be an issue, it is really difficult to make the entire system free from potential exploiting.

** I had 1 temporary test share left for the @upvoteshares upvotes and added you to the list. It should give small daily upvote for the next few weeks.

Interesting that it's so easy to get more than 100% value.

I wonder if they're ever going to move to a KYC system to validate accounts and then you're only allowed one account. People would have to move their Steem to an account that they've gotten approved and go from there. Then again, that would cause another mess. Ha ha. I guess there's no way around it.

I would not mind if there was a way to have 1 central validated account with SP in it if it was possible to run multiple blogs on it. It's realy hard right now on steemit if you can only can have 1 blog while genuinely wanting to write about totally unrelated topics.

That's true. Maybe they could make it so you were able to have multiple blogs validated through one central account, but your other accounts weren't able to vote on each other. Then you could (possibly) work to slow self-rewarding.

There would still be voting circles, but self-rewarding would be lessened.

Clearly the goal isn't to cap self-voters, but to discourage self-voting. You're confusing the patient with the affliction.

In fact what you're talking about is better defined as ROI, not self voting. Self voting is just a tool in the belt of someone trying to maximize their ROI.

Why? I see no reason to care about self-voting the particular technical behavior. The idea is to reduce the ROI of voting selfishly in order to drive more outgoing votes.

Not necessarily a goal I agree with, in the first place. But if people are going to pursue it I wish they'd do it better.

Yet you spent half of your post talking about indirect methods of ROI, which is what I was commenting on.

What is your view of the purpose of rewards on Steem?

Yet you spent half of your post talking about indirect methods of ROI, which is what I was commenting on.

Explicitly trading a vote for a vote is still self-voting in all but the technical sense.

What is your view of the purpose of rewards on Steem?

Like any PoS system, they exist in order to encourage people to stake, commit to holding the coin, and thereby maintain its value.

Then on top of that is built this somewhat-compelling social game of voting and posting, which has all sorts of weird obfuscations of what's actually going on. Stake rewards are highly-restricted in terms of what can be done with them, in hopes of supporting the game, but it doesn't really work all that well. People who are primarily interested in the stake rewards have many methods to end-run around the game with varying effectiveness.

The people who are interested in playing the game get pissed off at the people who just want their stake rewards, because they're under the impression that everyone here should be playing the game under the rules they've made up for themselves, and try to redesign the system to push more people into playing the game which they envision.

This very likely will not work because if those people were interested in playing they already would be. It's pretty fun.

That's a nice summary, I like the way you've put it. Usually people overcomplicate it by talking about investors vs authors / curators, but your expression is neater.

Stake rewards are highly-restricted in terms of what can be done with them, in hopes of supporting the game, but it doesn't really work all that well.

Indeed, and it's debatable whether this part of HF20 under discussion will support the game further. You seem think it won't (or won't enough). I'm leaning towards that it will. It's also not clear that you care, at a guess you look like you've got a foot in end-running and foot in the game.

I'm still in favor of the idea that votes for the same accounts within a set time period should incur a penalty, which would perhaps best practically be implemented as another regenerating factor like VP. It would be like a VP per account you voting for. This was proposed by a friend of mine @rycharde about a year ago. It would support the game very much and push those interested only in stake rewards further into the territory of needing many multiple accounts, making it more expensive (driving out many opportunists) and increasing the possibility of dealing with the determined via sentinel bots.

The problem is that it is itself probably quite expensive for blockchain nodes in implementation. I think there are also "political" issues to overcome in terms of consensus (i.e. convincing people it's a good idea) but I continue to advocate for it.

It's also not clear that you care, at a guess you look like you've got a foot in end-running and foot in the game.

I like to think of it as seeing the value of both sides. I'm not convinced that systematic decisions forcing people to play the game are viable in any sense. I think the game has a fair number of players who play it voluntarily, for them it's reasonably rewarding, and we should focus on supporting and increasing that number rather than trying to get more begrudging players.

A system in which authors are trying to discourage certain upvotes almost certainly makes the game less fun, when we should be trying to make it more fun.

Thanks for keeping us noobs posted. Is there any change to when it is most profitable to upvote others with this hf20?

I self vote most of my posts, and I didn't know I got anything for doing so. I just figured if I posted it, I should like it too. My vote is useless thus far (I'm not important enough to have a vote worth anything), but I am working on it.

I was on FB a long time, old habits are hard to break.

So self voting is frowned upon here?

Thank you, in preparation, and not knowing about - " Make-a-Whale" - I have left a comment of my interest. "Qurator" system seemed a bit difficult for me to wrap my head around right now, so will look at them again in the future.

If the purpose of HF20 is to stop self-voting, the fork should make self-voting impossible.

I wish people should stop gaming the system. It’s not natural to wait for 15 minutes after reading an article to vote for it so that I can support the author. It will just discourage me from reading and upvoting fresh new contents. And I might forget to check old posts.

Thank you for bringing this issue to my attention.

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