How do we empower each of us to have a fair chance at earning a part of the new Steem and SBD created each day? Which rewards curve gives the ideal combination of giving each author a chance to earn while helping the most valuable contributions earn the most? When we vote for posts we love, how do we choose which posts rise to the top of the trending pages on steemit.com? Where are the opportunities to game the system based on each reward curve? Will you join us for a discussion about this during this live witness update because talking about this may help us to collectively to feel good about what we already have?
Answers?
For those intending to read, here are a few quick thoughts that we can talk more about during the live stream!
- When everyone's vote is equal and rewards are linear, we enjoy simplicity in having our vote on any one post worth the same as on another. With anything besides linear, we are incentivized vote on posts based on which pays out the most. When we previously used a non-linear rewards curve on Steem, we saw our votes worth as much as 100 times more on some posts versus others with generally most posts getting much less from an upvote while a few posts would earn nearly all the rewards.
- Today the rewards on a post are a primary consideration in which posts rise to the trending page which allows Steem power to directly control which posts rank the highest. If we use a system that considers more the quantity of votes, we reward duplicate account creation and mass networks of bot accounts placing thousands of votes in exchange for bids.
- The primary opportunity to "game the system" today is to pay for a lot of votes from voting bots on new posts which is very similar to how advertising works in the rest of the digital marketing world. If we change the reward structure, we may make voting bots even more profitable for some bidders. If we change the way posts hit the trending page by considering the number of votes, we will allow users creating thousands of bot accounts to not only control any trending page but also to profit off of accepting bids for votes by their bots.
- Do we help each author earn by keeping our rewards simple and fair with a linear rewards curve the way we have today or do we help our authors earn better by changing to something else?
Maintain or Change?
What appears best for the majority of us, especially those with lower Steem power, is to keep the rewards curve and the trending ranking exactly the way it is while encouraging and rewarding more participation in individual communities and tags.
I am actually arguing against what you might call my own self interest here because if we did change the rewards curve to super-linear in favor of posts with more votes and the voting rankings to considering the number of votes more, I would likely earn even more than I already do now without doing anything differently which is exactly why I am suggesting we keep the rewards curve the way it is.
If we changed the linear curve to reward posts with less votes more, that might help more of us get a better share of the reward pool at the cost of complicating mentally our voting. Steem is complicated enough and my vote is for keeping the way we reward authors the same while trusting our curators to help reward the best posts.
Voting Bots?
During the live stream, I will answer questions during the live stream about the @jerrybanfield bid bot, https://steembottracker.com/, and anything else we are interested in talking about! For support with my bid bot, will you please visit https://jerrybanfield.com/contact/ because everyone that can help is available to help in my discord channel?
To summarize, I think voting bots overall bring a lot of value to Steem while having many downsides that when we are aware of them seem reasonable in exchange for what we get. Voting bots making holding Steem power and delegating to a bot one of the best opportunities for investors to earn cryptocurrency just by holding without touching the principle which is very good for the Steem price trending up.
Meanwhile, voting bots have taken away a lot of the incentive for those especially with stake to provide upvotes making earning much more challenging for the average author not using voting bots. I personally have lost huge as an author since the rise of voting bots because many of the big upvoters that used to drop votes on my posts have delegated to voting bots including my own bot.
Keep Rewards Curve The Same?
With all of the innovations we are developing for Steem, it seems wise to leave the rewards curve alone while we focus on smart media tokens, communities, and developing more applications on Steem.
Thank you for reading and I hope this live witness update was helpful! I am available for most of the next hour to answer questions and will talk more about this in the video on @dlive!
Love,
Jerry Banfield
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My live stream is at DLive