RE: Math of Steem: Where does the profit from voting bots come from?
This is an excellent thought provoking post, thank you for that.
To me, it's odd to be comparing to the state where everyone (including steemit, Inc) is optimally self voting as the baseline for profit. It rather makes it all seem meaningless. After all, the staking/voting mechanism is about giving the stakeholders the ability to allocate funds from the reward pool to the participants of the platform, in a way that is agreeable to investors of the platform. And the state in which every single participant is merely posting nothing and self voting optimally has little value (...or does it...? If it can be adopted as a currency maybe....)
When people say profit comes from the reward pool, I don't see that as the wrong way to look at it. They are simply saying they don't agree with how the reward pool is being allocated, and that is relevant to your second point.
I think people really need to think about the question of value though. In my mind, as with the value of social networks in general, the value is almost entirely outreach and advertising. Content creation and consumption is most certainly part of this equation, but it is not where the actual money comes from (it attracts money though, eyeballs). Bid bots right now help with that which I grudgingly have to give them credit for, but that's not because bid bots are great. It's because the promotional avenues in the platform suck and this is a workaround.
Well it's not the baseline for total profit, just for vote-buying profit. When you stake you get rshares as profit and they're worth something. Vote-buying is about what you do with them afterward. You can look at it as giving up your resources in the Core Game for cash if you like, but your Core Game resources have equal systematic value no matter who you vote on.
If you like; but disagreeing with how the rewards pool is allocated in this sense is a fundamental disagreement with the Proof of Stake protocol and it's pretty much arguing with the sky. Bidbots don't change anything about the rewards pool. Those people's problem is with allocating it by staked SP and they should be honest with themselves and others about it.
As a resource with value, (rshares/voting power) it's certainly an odd thing to wrap my head around. Its intrinsic value is exactly the ability to decide, not the end result of choosing to use it on yourself. I still don't think it makes sense as a base line even for vote selling.
From my perspective, staking gives the power to choose, not only the power to possibly line one's own pockets. (And part of that is fear of being called out and having that value negated. Same for vote selling). The discussions we are all having affect this behavior and certainly are having effects on how people choose to behave. This is why I don't think it's necessarily as futile as arguing with the sky.
On a very basic level, if its value to you otherwise is less than using it on yourself, then not using it on yourself is you giving up value. It's not the vote fundamentally having less value.
In reality the baseline should be somewhere above self-voting, adjusted for how compelling the Core Game is across users who value their outgoing vote higher than their self-vote. That's the promise of Steem as a system. But getting to a number there is pretty difficult.
Ah interesting. Now I see what you mean. In this framework the goal would then be to convince vote sellers and such that they are being inefficient with their behavior (well, I guess that depends), though I'd add that the value seems to depend on the behavior of the game users as well. Makes it all very weird and circular in my head.
Oh, it's all very weird and circular out here too. Not helped by a white paper whose purpose is to obfuscate it all.
In between your comments I was thinking that I should be able to quantify my own premium on outgoing votes by analyzing my voting behavior. That might be useful for finding places I'm not using it as well as I would like.