Bad feeling about HF 19

in hf19 •  7 years ago  (edited)

Hey Steemit,

Yes I'm getting an increasingly bad feeling about HF 19 as I think about it more and more.

Tell me Steemit. Under the new system, why shouldn't I just make 1 post and 9 smart comments a day and vote them up myself and call it quits? My votes are powerful, it would be so much easier just to vote up my own things and then be done with it.

You know, Dan and Ned aren't idiots, they didn't just randomly come up with this N^2 willy nilly. They did it for a reason. It's game theory, with the N^2 power curve, there is a synergising affect of multi accounts voting on the same post, with an affect greater then single votes alone, and this is just as true with whale votes as any other.

Under N^2, my motivation for voting on other people's posts is to create good will and hope that people would return the favor and pile on to my posts too, creating that nice n^2 on my post to pump it up high.

Piling on a post is a good thing guys, not a bad thing! We love it when people group together and create a magical effect that doesn't happen with individuals.

Well under plain old N voting, that magic is gone..so I may as well just vote on my own stuff right? I mean, yea I'll probably still try to vote on other peoples posts..because I'm trying to make Steemit a better place but now the System itself will be whispering in my ear "Neoxian, just vote on your own stuff...it's easier right?"

If we wanted to limit the effects of the largest whales, there are smarter ways to go about it. Why not just do something like this:

  • No account shall effect a post by more then X percent of the reward pool. With X being some number like..1% maybe. This X number could even just be a witness setting, so we wouldn't have to hard fork every time we wanted to change it.

Since I have your attention, why not make the number of votes per day another Witness setting too? As a Witness I wouldn't mind having lots of dials and numbers to set.


(image from the internet)

I don't mind if my witness console looks like this....

neoxian
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From the minnow perspective I think it has to become viable to earn from a post without being found by a whale .
Simply because of huge numbers: with the huge growth of the platform and hence overload of new content the job to find good content is impossible to be done by the small number of whales.

So if new contributors get in a situation where hundreds of votes by new members don't move the needle in earnings or visibility it will lead to disengagement.

That will stop growth dead in its tracks and will devalue your account in the long run.

In the end I think you as a whale are in the position of an affiliate marketer: give up some percentage of the pie in order to grow the pie exponentially.

Will you lose money in the short run? Maybe, but its not in your interest either if the perception persists or is started that only whales are raking in the money!

This is a nice sounding comment that didn't really address specific points in my post. Congrats on getting voted so high though. You know, I did offer an idea in my post to limit whale power.

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On the other hand I don't believe that a system where your vote to yourself gives you high value is healthy for the community in the long run. The whole concept of producing content in this platform and in every social platform is to give useful, valuable content to the world and earn your place there, not to post and upvote by yourself. Even if I am not fully aware of how the system works and will work after the fork, as @neoxian presented the current working state and with the facts that I read, in my opinion he gave a really good preview of what will happen and we must considered the consequences.

Started to think things through after reading @Aggroed's post: https://steemit.com/hf19/@aggroed/shaved-whale-balls-and-mega-circle-jerks-the-economics-of-hf-19-a-witness-update

starting to see what @neoxian meant with the cockpit idea.

The argument seems to be that although now a fraction goes to minnows, there will be a risk of even more money concentration by the top earners,
with a net effect of slim to no earnings for all the rest. Replied to @neoxian's reply with more explanation.

ohh well I do see some none greedy users here but at the same time there are equal amount of greed, so how you described it... seems like we are in for a ride coming Tuesday.

I dobt actually know the hard fork and havent read whats actually about to happen. But if what you are saying is correct, then its a good thing cos no one man should be able to lead the world into death.

I will vote @neoxian as a witness because you help me to earn my very first dollar here in steemit. Cheers

Thanks!

You know, Dan and Ned aren't idiots, they didn't just randomly come up with this N^2 willy nilly. They did it for a reason. It's game theory, with the N^2 power curve, there is a synergising affect of multi accounts voting on the same post, with an affect greater then single votes alone, and this is just as true with whale votes as any other.

Except all of this is with the assumption of equal vested accounts. Not a reality.

Interesting.

  1. Low SP accounts. Surely self-voting would not be a successful strategy in growing a stake, which would still, I hope, require integration and acceptance.

  2. High SP accounts. For the old accounts, is it too much to hope that these would have some conception of the importance of the longterm health of the platform and its economy, and not wish to jeapardise their social standing? And for any new whale planning to game the system, they would run the risk of yet another hardfork, and or a collapse in the price.

  3. So for the mid-range accounts. I guess your fears have some grounding, but given how quickly these hardforks come around, burning social reputation by nakedly upvoting a pile of one's own comments would seem to be short-sited beyond belief. But could a new user invest say $1000 and mine the reward pool as you suggest? What are the numbers?

HF 18 gives me no reason to be optimistic about hardforks in general. The $2+ STEEM is no different from the surge in other ALTS, can not be attributed to HF 18. Flagrant abuses seem to have been a part of the platform from the start, will this increase them? Of course I hope you are wrong, but I guess it will be more important than ever to keep eyes open.

I might have to revise my optimism. I've already starting to notice comments on posts, mine and others, saying something like "great post, yada yada", and then the user upvoting their own comment but not the post. Very strange.

I might have misunderstood this completely then. Doesn't the change affect just the value of each individual vote and not the way votes work together on the same post? I though one was changing and the other was staying the same.

Am I getting this wrong?

Yes, you are getting it wrong. There will no longer be any synergy between multiple people voting on the same thing.

That's quite unfortunate. Thanks for clearing that up and setting me straight then. You are the first one I see that has mentioned that consequence and now I feel a bit stupid for echoing the positive sentiment that might turn out to be baseless optimism.

We'll see how people will end up behaving, but the counterproductive incentives are definitely there.

I would have to agree with your perspective on this, @neoxian. It sounds like they are planning to play down whales voting influence immensely. Your wonderful idea of individuals influencing a maximum % of a pool sounds like a MUCH better idea than what they are to implement.

New follower here. Keep up the good work.

Best Regards,
@abn

HF 17, HF 18, HF 19, I am still poor!

You are waiting for HF Rich .

He would like it to H the F up

lol

No matter what this is a hell of a ride!

Yeah FOR REAL 😂 seems like many people are just dumping their whole savings into here 🤞🏽

That's a point I never thought of before, the cumulative effect. Sometimes I think it would be good if there was a weeks trial run of hard fork effects before they become concrete.

I never thought about the flip side consequences either.
I do admit to upvoting my own post but I don't think I've ever posted more than 3 posts in a 24 hour period so I don't consider that abuse. I never upvote my own comments. Sure, it could be lucrative but I simply couldn't bring myself to go to the dark side like that.

You know what they say about the dark side!! Its strooooong. Lol, kidding!

I think it will have an impact on votes but then again loads of folk dont care that much about it at the mo so maybe not!

Tell me Steemit. Under the new system, why shouldn't I just make 1 post and 9 smart comments a day and vote them up myself and call it quits?

Maybe because Steemit is a social network and no one makes new friends with such behavior?

But I share your concerns and can't come up with any other good reasons why people won't vote for themselves. Maybe we should just accept it and consider it as a reward for investing so much in Steem.

My point was the n^2 encourages people to vote on each other, where as N does not encourage this. The system should encourage good behavior.

Although this is possible, I think it is not an optimal strategy to gain rewards. It is also possible that such votes can be discovered by others and beeing flagged.

I spend a large amount of time reading and commenting on here. It seems to me that HF19 will de-incentivise spending this much time interacting.
If this is going to just simply further the earnings of the few, I cant see many small accounts stay around for pennies at best. I mean yeah maybe the people in other countries where the pennies matter, but not many in the US or UK will find it worthwhile.

just make 1 post and 9 smart comments a day and just vote them up myself

steemurbating ^^

@neoxian, I wish I understood this more. How does it affect an old bastard like myself? I upvote my posts and all the comments made by others on my posts. Steem On wise one.

When Ned and Dan created this existing system, they wanted to make sure that everyone didn't just vote for themselves all the time. This would be a very boring and anti-social system if most people just voted on their own stuff and no one else's. This is why they set the power curve to be N^2 instead of N.

HF 19 is changing N^2 back to N, so there will be less reason to vote on other people and more reason to vote on yourself. Now, well people's behavior really change because of this? Probably not so much and probably not at first anyways, but I'm willing to bet that this selfish behavior will become at least a little bit more common in the future.

I hope all is well after this hardfork. I like what we have going on now. Steem On!

Tell me Steemit. Under the new system, why shouldn't I just make 1 post and 9 smart comments a day and vote them up myself and call it quits? My votes are powerful, it would be so much easier just to vote up my own things and then be done with it.

Your votes won't be worth much after HF19. Currently, you're enjoying your time as an effective whale with overpowered votes given quadratic curve and the experiment. I don't know how much less it'll be - it depends on how many minnows are active and voting - but if you're giving out $5 now, be prepared to give out less than $0.50 after HF19.

Doesn't matter, point still holds, and if the question doesn't apply to me, then ask it of whoever is throwing out 5$ votes.

I dont fully understand the changers that are happening. But I do know that @neoxian is doing more than his fair share to keep steemit moving in the right direction, that benefit all of us, big and small. Cheers

I think the comments for this post and their potential payouts is pretty good indication that people generally aren't very objective when evaluating their own work and that there's a very broad (and skewed) interpretation of what "quality" content is.

I've seen the big posts and the "pig piling" that @aggroed talked about too.

As things stand now, I think the big influx of new users right now is going to be short lived.

But I'm not that concerned about it, if use/engagement due to HF19 and whale voting patterns crashes Steemit it will either correct itself or go belly up.

I'd prefer to see the community come to it's senses and put something in place that truly delivers on the Steemit promise, that's fair and equitable to what you put into it.

But I'm still going to hedge my bets and get some smoking-hot 19 year old to pose for an introduceyourself pic and build a personna around her via poetry and naked yoga posts.

And, out of deference to all of the previous comments, I AM NOT upvoting my own comment.

Now the hot chick introduction post is some good strategy right there!

You might need to change your name though, maybe photos-for-old-guys? ;-)

You've got some great photos on your blog.

I upvoted a few and am following.

I agree with what you say but many people sayd will be better ! The world is full of greedy selfish people and they will do exactly what you say but there are also a good people who will support and help ! I chose to belive in the good and this for will stay positive for any changes around !

I've missed a lot of what's going on, so I'm afraid I need this to be dumbed down quite a lot for me. Definitely not gonna ask you to go through that trouble.

It sounds like Steemit is about to becoming SteemingPileOShit here soon, and that the ability to earn SBD is about to be fucked to hell and back.

That's a shame. I thought I might actually be able to help contribute to our finances while being myself.

You bring up a very good point @neoxian. When the dust settles in about 2 weeks, I hope we still have a community that is generous and that values good content and good people.

I don't really have any plans to change how I vote until I see how quickly the vote power is drained. I might have to tweak SteemVoter a little bit but we'll see what we see. :) Like you said, @nepd, hopefully the community remains generous with good values and good content. fingers crossed!

When will HF 19 apply @neoxian

It is scheduled for Tue, 20 Jun 2017 at 15:00:00 UTC

Yes, thanks for your information @penguinpablo

Tuesday I believe

Hopefully will be better than before

Yea, I think the negative effects can be seen by looking at the polar extremes of focused voting:

-0.1% strength per vote you have to vote on hundreds of things to drain down your voting power, not reasonable to vote up yourself for all of those so you'll spread it around.

-100% strength per vote you only have to vote on 1 thing to drain down your voting power, easy to use it all on yourself and great incentive to do that.

so moving to higher strength and faster drain is a step in that direction, hopefully it has some good side effects to make up for it

Constant change of the voting system keeps people alerted. If it goes bad we can always hard fork back to old voting system. The key is to try to be honest and fair and not give everything to ourselves, even though it will be way too easy to do just that :)

These are wise words and well thought about, there will be a work arround to every system set in place , think having settings to change a system or program is much better than having a full upgrade everytime you see it needs change, hope they hear you..

I am not worried about the concept. I am worried about its reception.

Nice post. Only time will tell, if the next system will bring more bad than good.

So what's gonna happen if it goes like you say, how fucked are we? How long does it take to make a HF 20?

That's a thing I've also been wondering about but I don't have the answer.

Good thoughts from you ..
You have great sound power on the post, but you always use it for posting that should get it or a good post.
I think this is the right choice.

I agree that making the 100% vote 4x as powerful might twist the way people vote in a bad direction, not only because you will vote for yourself, but because the power you suddenly wield will cluster into the already existing network of not only whales but also middle-class fish. I would feel tempted to vote big for some of my old favourites that I think was overlooked, and then don't have voting power left for some of the new accounts.

I think it will further clique mentality.

We can just keep everything the same... hmmm

HAHA

  ·  7 years ago (edited)

Yeah, I have the same feeling. At first, I was excited about HF19 but not anymore.

Its time for bot voting at 30min mark.
Whatever HF they perform, high earner will still be the high earner. The only important change on this HF is the curation reward adjustment. Minnow will still be minnows unless you have 5kSP or more. :)

I am 2 weeks old here , and feel something is changing, and I am glad I am in it, no matter go or bad.

I really like the idea of some of these variables being adjustable at the witness level since hard forks carry with them a certain level of uncertainty. It would be nice to be able to deal with an issue at the witness level quickly without going through the rigmarole of a hard fork.

Everyone voting for themselves should cancel out. I think letting occasional users use their whole power will shift the reward curve away from the largest everyday users. I would love to see some stats on how much untapped voting power there is. I suspect it might be pretty large considering that there are so many inactive accounts and assuming a direct relationship between inactive and everyday active user.

The Hardford is coming!!!

SteemPunk console!!!
I don't like how we go after whales!!! Some of them are not actively on the platform but most of them curate. It have the underlying idea that rich =bad, which might be true in real life but not all the time.
I think I will start to be a witness...

Tomorrow is the day huh?

I hope it doesn't turn into 'vote for yourself' festival like you say!

I like hearing both sides of the story so I sent people your way and included your post in my last one! Cheers!

just so we're clear, you're worried about a greater democratization of the platform or that your personal earnings will go down because of it?

there is no right answer, but those are two very different things. and it doesn't make you bad to want more money, but the time you spend shouldn't change by much. you will spend more time browsing/curating and reading others.

because under the new system with less votes to go around, users will be encouraged to compete and create BETTER content, testing their writing talents and creativity against other users. really earning the vote, instead of the half ass quick hitters that get upvoted because the system is being gamed or whatever term you want to use for that.

I notice that you voted for yourself. Just pointing that out. ;)

i don't see the correlation. should i not be doing that? either I've been posting for 6 days and what i vote for gains me nothing anyways or you're avoiding answering the question...

i think it's the latter, just thought i'd point that out

and for someone bragging about making millions of dollars a couple blogs down, it's pretty low to come back with snark after a well thought out comment from a new member as opposed to engaging in conversation.

guess I could read between the lines and got my answer to the question without it. saved us both some time.

  ·  7 years ago Reveal Comment

Flagged for spam.

  ·  7 years ago (edited)Reveal Comment

Flagged for spamming again.

  ·  7 years ago Reveal Comment

You picked a fight with the wrong person. Enjoy your new rep of 11.

  ·  7 years ago Reveal Comment

You are just some minnow with a shitty attitude as far as I can tell.