Make tipu game mechanics/ theory even better!

luegenbaron (64) in steem • 5 years ago (edited)

I'm being active as @tipu curator for a few days now. Basically since the beginning.
And I really love this new kind of decentralized vote/curation bot/mechanism.
It's like the next evolutionary step of bid bots, I truly enjoy it. And think it can also make others enjoy steem more. Curators and authors. And maybe even incentive them to power up some steem! ;)

(CC0 unsplash - chose this cuz one new (black) curation/voting bot under many old (white ones) and chess is one of the most popular games ;) )

It's the first experiment/ project where masses of people can play around with big votes at all. It is gamified and also makes normal / "#oldsteem" bid and voting bots massive competition.
Like the worst competition they could have imagined.
Who would wanna buy votes if curators like me just throw around with free quite big votes? ;)

But I also had some thoughts on how to make it even better; I wanna share them with you:

The game mechanics incentive to vote on stuff which is likely to always pay out high // "maximize curation"

While I can understand that incentive from a profit and curation rewards point of view...
I don't like it from a game theory point of view. We should incentive people to vote stuff which is undervalued and original, instead of already good earning authors.
(Also cuz of the tipu vote delay you can't really snipe perfect curation yet..)

For the beginning that's not a big problem. I wouldnt change it straight away cuz with this profit-oriented mechanics we can make normal bid bots bigger competition..
But later on, when the new system already earned some steem and etablished itself, maybe got some new delegations, we should go a different direction, even though it get's more complex and harder to code.

Basically I can just game your game theory by always voting on stuff which is bid botted, nominate sockpuppets, vote on stuff by already very good earning authors or just my own spam.
Here is a post and a list about the best earning authors

Which brings me to my next point:

How do we counter abuse?

Everyone can become a curator, even completely new accounts. And everyone can nominate curators. Even their own new accounts to then vote themselves.
People can also vote on bid botted stuff, which is against the #newsteem paradigm.

So how do we counter this in a decentralized manner?

I can only think of expanding the current gamification/ game theory/ mechanics:
Maybe nominate some "community reviewers", which need a high level/ score and can depending on that also unvote stuff, which abusive curators voted on via @tipu..?
A list on the tipu website, displaying recent made upvotes by tipu, would also be very helpful for these people - they could also just use steemd for the beginning.. ;)

People should also have the option/ a command to unvote their tipu vote if they made a mistake.. like voting for abuse..
or like me who didnt understand that we can also split the votes by adding a number (like 0.05) after the @tipu curate command.. ^^
I would have needed an option to unvote and then vote again with a not so big vote.. :D

I'm very interested in your opinions!

Also keep in mind I'm just really hyped right now and don't demand these new features. I'm already freaking happy about this first new evolutionary step and shouldn't ask for too much. Next steps will surely come! ;)

Thanks @cardboard for this great work! :)

/ Jan

steem curation bot newsteem evolution dev community steemleo palnet

5 years ago by luegenbaron (64)

$5.68

Authors get paid when people like you upvote their post.
If you enjoyed what you read here, create your account today and start earning FREE STEEM!

Sort Order:

Trending

[-]

art.int (52) · 5 years ago

@tipu cancel curation self-voting
:D :D

You make some valid points. For me the gamification will end up dividing the curators in 3 categories :

Circle-voters. People will vote first with Tipu, then with their circle-voting accounts, getting high curation rewards for Tipu but allowing them to fuel further their voting circle with Tipu's SP.
Maximizers. People who blindly upvote content to maximize returns. They will also get a big part of Tipu's SP, allowing them to earn money from curation without having any proprietary SP.
Genuine curators : These will never have access to Tipu's SP as the two categories above will get all of Tipu's SP.

If you start to have moderation, "star" curators, etc... you just end up with a curation bot like ocdb or appreciator / rocky1, smartsteem, etc... It's good too, but tipu has always been innovative, shouldn't stop now.

My opinion would be that you won't find a system that suits and optimizes resources with all these different categories out there.

For the

Circle-voters : Just ban them. You analyze the curator's CSI and the votes coming after the curator's CSI. This way, if CSI are low in both cases, you know you have a circle-voter and auto-ban him.
You create a real curation system for optimization (let's not forget tipu runs thanks to the delegators who except a ROI on their delegated SP) : you pay the curators to optimize tipu's voting. You allocate to them 50% of tipu's VP. Let's call this the OO (optimized operation).
You create a gamified league, not revolving around getting liquid rewards but just getting more curation possibilities : essentially what the system is currently., but with having excluded the two above categories. You allocate 50% to Tipu's VP here. Let's call this GO (gamified operation).

You also need to make sure there's a turnover for the GO (OO being based on pure optimization, you can let the "free market" do its job), but this system can not be based on optimizing or it will defeat the purpose. Maybe base it on CSI (diversification of votes) or another unit of measurement.
This way you got the OO part that allow tipu to continue reward its delegators with a correct APR and the GO part that benefits all of the Steem ecosystem (allowing people to taste what it's like to have a bit of SP, as you said, it might incentize a lot of people to power up).

So for me, the OO part can be done pretty easily as it's all mathematical.
The GO part is the one that needs a lot of thought, as if you base it on curation rewards, you'll only duplicate the OO, but to be really interesting, you need to find an incentive for content discovery (how to measure that ?) but also allow a correct turnover of curators (so that a lot of people can try it out).

$0.00

3 votes

[-]

cardboard (61) · 5 years ago

Thank you for the feedback, a lot to process :)

At the end of the day I just want good authors that create valuable content to be rewarded, even if it's done by voting circles. Probably what we should focus on is to also reward awesome authors that haven't been noticed yet - so they don't leave discouraged but rather stay on STEEM and tell their friends how cool it is :)

$0.00

2 votes

[-]

carlgnash (69) · 5 years ago

Hi @cardboard I am a very active curator (cofounder of @c-squared / @c-cubed curation group) and would love to participate in your project as a curator. Would be great to be able to give an extra boost to those really awesome posts I find and should be a good bost for tipu as well as a ton of big votes often end up coming along behind my curation.

RE the discussion above about how incentivize the behavior you want from your curators:

I think you can find a middle ground between outright banning curators who only curate the same circle (jerk), and not taking into account diversity of curation in the reward at all. Something common sense might be generate a curator score from (as first ideas): diversity of authors curated (higher score = less likely to be repeat authors curated over and over); avg. author payout of curated authors (higher score for curating lower rewarded authors); curation reward generated for tipu from curation (which could still be a metric that circle-jerky type curators / curators who curate higher paid authors do well at); curator CSI (giving higher scores for people who are less circle jerky in their overall voting behavior). Then order curators by their combined score (weighted however makes sense) and scale the payout accordingly. Circle jerky curators who curate good content (but from a small / well rewarded circle) would fall toward the back third, so they could keep on participating but just not receive as much reward as those who are actually out there actively curating for new content and spreading their vote around.

I am sure you are already thinking of ways to do quality control checks on curators, one easy of course would be to order curators by total negative rshares (flags) received by posts they curate and starting your quality control checks there.

$0.00

1 vote

[-]

cardboard (61) · 5 years ago

Thank you very much for the feedback, I bookmarked the post to get back it when I will be working on those systems - I like the idea of weighted score :) And of course @tipu nominate

$0.00

[-]

carlgnash (69) · 5 years ago

thanks mate :)

$0.00

[-]

tipu (67) · 5 years ago

Hi @carlgnash! @cardboard has nominated you to become a @tipU curator! You can now request 3 @tipU upvotes per day on any content you like. The better curation reward you can get, the more upvotes with higher value you can send. You can nominate new curators as well!

To send the upvote, please comment under the post and at the end of the comment, add: @tipu curate. To nominate someone else you think would make a good @tipU curator, reply to one of their posts or comments with: @tipu nominate. All of this is of course free :)
Check out https://tipu.online/curator?carlgnash for more information and to see your stats :). Have fun!

$0.00

[-]

art.int (52) · 5 years ago

Yeah, all the difficulty will be in finding a middle ground between optimizing curation rewards and discovering new content.
Don't want to be pessimistic, but from my point of view, they're incompatible.

For example, when OCD discovers new content, it in fact only profits to anomadsoul, which front-runs the votes from ocd, ocd-witness and ocdb with his "triggering" account cameraman.
The only other people making curation rewards from content "discovered" (upvoted) by OCDB are "lucky voters" who casted their votes before, or insiders (I don't know how they work really, but I suppose the person who suggested the post). In fact I suppose most of those "lucky voters" are in fact the "insiders" or at least partly.

Sure, the vote from tipu (around 1$) might give the post some spotlight and trigger votes after it (if it arrives in the hot section for example), but I wouldn't overestimate that effect.

For me you said it all here

good authors that create valuable content to be rewarded, even if it's done by voting circles

If you want good return on curation rewards, you will need to study the voting circles and vote at the right time, or front-run all the tipu votes with your cardboard account (in that case, you'll become a great performing curator, like anomadsoul is :D )
If you don't care about curation rewards, you can start "discovering content"

As Tipu is a business with delegators behind, that's why I would separate both activities which, are, as I said, in my opinion incompatible :

An optimized curation system to ensure a good return to delegators,
An open curation initiative to allow people to curate with higher votes, with high turnover among curators to really allow new authors to be curated / discovered

$0.00

[-]

luegenbaron (64) · 5 years ago (edited)

Don't want to be pessimistic, but from my point of view, they're incompatible.

Cuz of that paradoxon, I've written this post.
You already stated that you don't support reviewers (or do you?)
I do cuz I think working in this direction is also working in the direction of a real DAO ;)

@ocdb or @curangel are not really decentralized.

$0.00

[-]

shaka (72) · 5 years ago (edited)

The game mechanics incentive to vote on stuff which is likely to always pay out high

Not true imo. Voting on these posts will at least not bring you high up the ranks. Go through that list of the most successful authors which you have shared and try for yourself to achieve more than 100% curation efficiency on any of their posts. Good luck with that :)

What the game mechanics incentivizes most is to find the hidden gems in the new section. Those posts that are still at (almost) zero payout at the 5 minute mark but turn out to be popular at a later time-point.

$0.00

2 votes

[-]

luegenbaron (64) · 5 years ago (edited)

If think ur bias is that your argument needs many others (not only tipu curators) to also vote these gems.. after the tipu vote.
But we have many circle jerks and also a ton of uninformed people who vote on posts which already have a high payout instead of the opposite..

Also click on the current #1 tipu curator and then tell me on which post she got the biggest score.. ;]

$0.00

[-]

cardboard (61) · 5 years ago

Thanks for the feedback :)

The idea to create review team was already proposed by couple users so most probably we're gonna go that way.

I also love the idea to create website section just to review the recent curation votes - this will be really helpful :)

Ultimately I think it's impossible to design a system that prohibits any abuse but we can get close with manual validation. Cheers!

$0.00

1 vote

[-]

dotwin1981 (68) · 5 years ago

Dann schmeiße ich mal wieder mit !BEER und !trdo um mich. 🍺 😵 🍺

$0.00

2 votes

[-]

trendotoken (59) · 5 years ago

Congratulations @dotwin1981, you are successfuly trended the post that shared by @luegenbaron!
@luegenbaron will receive 0.25209000 TRDO & @dotwin1981 will get 0.16806000 TRDO curation in 3 Days from Post Created Date!

"Call TRDO, Your Comment Worth Something!"

^{To view or trade TRDO go to steem-engine.com

Join TRDO Discord Channel or Join TRDO Web Site}

$0.00

[-]

luegenbaron (64) · 5 years ago

@tipu curate 1.5

$0.00

[-]

tipu (67) · 5 years ago

Upvoted 👌

$0.00

[-]

beerlover (62) · 5 years ago

^{View or trade BEER.}

Hey @luegenbaron, here is a little bit of BEER for you. Enjoy it!

$0.00

[-]

steemitboard (66) · 5 years ago

Congratulations @luegenbaron! You have completed the following achievement on the Steem blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :

You got more than 13500 replies. Your next target is to reach 14000 replies.

_{You can view your badges on your Steem Board and compare to others on the Steem Ranking}
_{If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word STOP}

Do not miss the last post from @steemitboard:

The new SteemFest⁴ badge is ready

Vote for @Steemitboard as a witness to get one more award and increased upvotes!

$0.00

[-]

carlgnash (69) · 5 years ago

Cool hadn't heard of the tipu curation project before receiving a tip from u last night and then reading your post. Want to nominate me as a curator? I already spend a ton of time curating (am one of the founders of @c-squared / @c-cubed) and it would be nice to be able to give an extra updoot to the real gems I come across. Cheers