RE: What is excellent about HF20?
I really like voting mana, which they undersold even further in this update than they have before.
What I find not-so-excellent is the overall approach which prioritizes punishing undesirable behaviors rather than making things better for anyone. The idea that you can "improve user experience" by allowing new users to vote and not telling them that it won't count for anything is deeply troubling on an attitude level even if the actual effect is almost too tiny to care about.
Similarly the focus on killing off the way that early vote curation goes to authors without finding anything good to do with the money that's going in that direction now is troubling. I can see the desire to remove that functionality, but the choice to "return the excess to the pool" is a very bad way to go about things and is going to cause all sorts of unintended weird behavior.
And underselling voting mana falls in with this, as they keep acting like it's there to solve a couple of obscure bugs no one cares about when in fact it's a serious upgrade to the voting system.
That is a good point. It would probably be better to make this more obvious, perhaps via some sort of 'leveling up' gamification when the user approaches and then reaches the point where their vote starts to count.
I can't agree here, though I do agree there might be unintended consequences. Returning to the pool just means that all payouts will be proportionately larger as a result (the increase will be slightly more to curators overall). All of the money in the pool gets paid out to someone.
This is a vast oversimplification. What actually happens for everything that is "returned to the pool" is that it inflates the value of everyone's vote proportionally to their stake. (Each rshare becomes worth more of the rewards pool.)
Whenever that happens, it broadens the equity gap, makes whales and bidbots more powerful relative to everyone else, and exacerbates most of the perceived problems on Steem. That's where most of the self-voting and circle-jerk and bidbot profit comes from, and it's at least part of why Trending is constantly full of crap.
"Returned to the pool" in the guise of @steemit's declined stake and other smaller factors is already a pretty big problem and HF20 is just going to make it larger.
'Inflating the value of everyone's vote' makes no sense when the value (reward pool STEEM per rshare) is variable not fixed (as a function of the amount of voting and somewhat the schedule of actual payouts), and it can't increase any 'equity gap' because the value is the same for everyone.
The pool will reach a new equilibrium with slightly more going to curators and slightly less going to authors (specifically the authors who receive early votes, whether self-votes or not). In practice the shift will not be much at all; the vast majority of the pool will still go to authors. In many cases an author who gets a little less by losing out from the early votes will then get a little more from the pool being bigger, for hardly any net change. It is very unlikely that most users (unless they routinely use the instant self-vote) will even notice a difference.
I'd like to see a more substantial change but I can't get worked up about this either way because it is almost nothing. I consider it in the category of small code tweaks.
This is absolutely not true. The value is greater the greater your stake. The increase in value of votes from anything that "returns to the pool" increases the value of your vote 40 times as much as it increases mine, because it inflates the value of every rshare equally and you distribute a lot more of them than I do.
Example: my 100% vote is 8c, yours is $3.38, and @smartsteem's is $177.26. The base "return to the pool" from HF20, absent any change in behavior, will be about 7%. (We'll actually get a lot of behavior changes and it will be less, but I'll use this number for convenience.)
A 7% increase in all of our power means my vote will now be eight and a half cents, yours will be $3.61, and Smartsteem's will be $189.67. Thus a much larger equity gap, and whales distributing a much larger portion of the pool relative to everyone else.
No, that won't happen. Think of it this way: If 1000 STEEM goes into the pool each day, 1000 STEEM comes out of the pool each day. Nothing about this change affects how much goes in, therefore it also doesn't change how much comes out. Assuming the same number of votes by the same amount of SP, each vote is allocating exactly the same portion as before (though it is allocating it a bit differently between authors and curators).
More will go to curation rewards and less to author rewards, but amount allocated by each voter will remain the same.
Even if what you wrote about the increase all of our power were correct, the portion (i.e. fraction) distributed by whales wouldn't be any different than before. Your own example demonstrates this. In the first case, @smartsteem is distributing 98.09% (177.26/(177.26+3.38+0.08)) and in the second case @smartsteem is distributing 98.09% (189.67/(189.67+3.61+0.085)).
The only way your claim about a shift of "gap" could be correct would be whales and non-whales systematically differ in how much extra they award to authors by the current (to be removed) early voting bonus to authors. That's possible but certainly not obvious, and your example didn't demonstrate it (or even claim it).
Your assumption is incorrect. What you want is "assuming the same number of rshares used to assign the pool" and HF20 will change that number by destroying some of them in the post payout process.
The fact that some of the rshares are destroyed after the vote doesn't really matter, they're still not being used to determine the rewards. So it's equivalent to a dramatic reduction in voting.
It's probably easier to think about this in some of the other ways "return to the pool" happens, like @steemit not voting. But it's the same effect.
Again, 1000 STEEM goes into the pool each day, which means 1000 STEEM goes out. If 1 million SP place votes, then STEEM is awarded out of the pool at a rate of 0.001 STEEM/SP. What happens in between doesn't matter.
There's no way around this.
(Obviously these numbers are made up and hypothetical. Substitute the actual numbers and the actual rate of STEEM/SP will still remain the same before and after.)
While the numbers end up the same, the calculations have different denominators, and that turns out to be pretty important.
The total Steem in the pool is determined based on the total number of Steem in existence, while the distribution of the pool is determined based on the SP used to generate rshares.
Now that SBD is closer to normal that ratio is the primary factor determining things like the self-voting APR and the total profit available in a vote-selling transaction. It's a big deal.
Wait, new users voting does affect the like amounts though, does it? If they do, then I'd say it does count as you know, Instagram exists where likes just represent people liking specific content and millions of people seem to be very happy using it.
You find it troubling that Steemit inc lets stake holders decide what "anything good" is like it should be rather than decide on their own where the money should go? I'd say that's more troubling.
Could you explain how voting mana is big deal? I haven't heard any talk about it.
Personally I'm most excited for account creation, it's about time services built upon Steem can actually let users create accounts from their interfaces fast and free.
This is the exact opposite of what HF20 is doing. When you vote and assign rshares to a post under HF20, some of those rshares (which currently go to the post author) will be destroyed based on what votes have come in during the fifteen-minute penalty period.
They are taking away some of your stake and using it to increase the rewards value of all rshares across the pool. The same vote will have different influence over the rewards depending on what post it's given to. If you vote on a post that has no votes in the penalty period your vote will continue to have as much influence as it does now, but every vote that goes to the post in the first fifteen minutes will reduce your later vote's effectiveness.
So the rshares that are being redirected are those that author would gain from all votes before 15 minute mark?
I thought the redirection would only happen to rewards that author would gain from selfvoting before 15 minute mark (curation rewards only) but by your description it applies even without selfvote from author?
And now that we're talking about how much control the system should have over the stake holders, I think it's clear that we need to have rules layed out on the blockchain level that encourage behavior that is beneficial to everyone and not just the highest holders of SP. For example now we can see that the trending tab has been taken over by post promotion, yet the Steemit Inc still speak about "proof-of-brain" with straight faces, which is a bit amusing to me, @ned you agree?
So it looks like the investors will take the shortest route to maximum possible financial reward - and that's why we're seeing promote bots, selfvoting (through multiple accounts) and circlejerking.
This kind of behavior should be altered by blockchain level rules as human is greedy and needs rules as otherwise we'll see others misbehaving and having to choose between acting good and losing money or following others and doing harm (in my opinion) to the whole ecosystem. Steem is a laughing stock when it comes to quality content currently.
So I'd say Steemit Inc really should take a step back and think about ways to guide users to act good rather than bad on this small, fragile ecosystem. Some simple rules like decreasing voting power on repeated votes towards same accounts would force people to actually widen the reach of their VP rather than setup systems that vote on their behalf also increasing curation rewards greatly would make actual curation and proof-of-brain more likely to happen instead of whales just parking their SP to promotion bots that everyone can and needs to use to reach trending feed with their questionable quality content.
These are my current thoughts on this issue. How popular would Reddit be if its trending page would be just full of advertisement like here on Steem, @andrarchy you got any guesses?
Yes, it applies to all votes before fifteen minutes, not just self-votes.
I agree, the system already sucks for new users they shouldn't be making it worse.