If everyone acts out of pure self-interest - which we should assume - will this end up in a game of some few?
Right now I am incentivized to set up an up-voting bot. It looks like a few people have the reputation of collecting lots of votes, and if I act in pure self-interest I will try to quickly up-vote those people, which is best done with a bot. When many people do this, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and no-one needs to change habits. It doesn't even require human effort.
Will this game ruin Steem in the end? It might be a nice gold mine, but short sighted. The posts getting to the top may not be as valuable as many others, which means the curation doesn't work, and people might feel it as unfair and leave for greener pastures. Why put the effort in a quality post if someone lucky reaps the rewards anyway. I'm not saying I feel this way - I've been lucky myself, but I can see the danger.
One factor contributing to this is the disproportional effect of the upvotes of our dear whales. They are too predictable and too powerful. The rewards one gets by deciding for oneself what is valuable and what is not, is insignificant compared to just anticipating what the whales will value. I'm not quite sure how this effect works, but sure looks like there is a pattern emerging. After the first payout the whales will have a few % less power, but it might not be enought to counter this phenomenom.
I don't know how this will play out. Maybe when everyone joins the autovoting game the playing field will level out by itself, just like the goldmines tend to vanish. Autovoting also adds value by supporting those with a good track-record. It's like reputation.
One thing is sure; if those with the most power thinked short-sightedly, this thing would crash. Luckily that doesn't seem to be the case, and everyone with a long term commitment has the incentive to share the good, be inclusive and generously share the rewards with newcomers. Crab-mentality will also help even out the playing field, as will benevolent actors, but they alone cannot fix a broken system.
I'm sorry if this post seems a little negative. I've just been thinking about this, what I think is a problem, and wanted to share it.
At a certain point the bots will have to diversify their voting in order to be profitable. When there are thousands of bots chasing hundreds of votes the odds of being early enough will be very high. In a way the voting efficiency will constantly adjust like mining difficulty in POW. Good content creators become the ASIC chips. The bot running will have to continuously find that sweet spot between super popular creators and niche creators.
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Thanks, that was the answer I was looking for. You are right in that the chance of getting your vote in early enough gets lower as bots become more popular. One use for autovoting bots will be autovoting yourself, and if anyone competes for the first spot there, it won't be a problem at all.
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Interesting. I guess I'm going to write a bot and auto self up voting script and join in. I just felt very bad (I'm one of those people) doing that until I realized that this is an acceptable practice. At least until the 4th or thereafter.
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Upvoted, but not sure the math works out because total rewards on a post continue to go up as it receives more votes.
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From the perspective of someone who wrote an auto upvote bot ...
To be honest, I only created an auto upvote bot to get in on the early action of prime content producers as I cannot monitor Steemit 24 hours a day and maximize my curation rewards. I didn't have the time to write a notifier bot (kudos to clayops who did!), and I knew that this type of bot would be much quicker to put together (a few hours of coding and learning some python versus a few days for me to figure how to send alerts, as I haven't created those types of tools before).
Since I thought this tool was of value to me, even though I knew that it would reduce my own payouts to have others using an autovote bot and wasn't trying to keep the tool for myself, I put it out to the community for general consumption.
Frankly, I think that this is a useful tool until the July 4th payout. After that, I am unsure as to its effectiveness.
Basically, if I have read an author often enough and know that they statistically create good content (or what others deem to be good content for whatever reason), I want to be able to upvote them as soon as possible. This maximizes my rewards --- but only under the current schema with the rewards being paid out on July 4th.
In addition, I really only think that this particular mechanism is only beneficial until the 4th of July, and that afterwards, new types of algorithms will be developed that will identify whom are either content producers that have quality content or those who are likely to find good content before others.
This type of algorithmic development (which is beyond what Steemit is (currently) providing), combined with the potential for proxy autovoting and / or notifications, is a valuable service that would rely on statistically reliable data mining methods to predict the best content. How can you fault machine learning? Or those who want to build on that knowledge? Granted, an auto upvote bot is naive, but it is rudimentarily the same.
A user begins to recognize other users who both write content and upvote content, and then they want to be able to upvote similarly, and before some of the larger, account holders. A user employs the use of an auto upvote bot to achieve this, as opposed to using an algorithm to suggest to him what accounts to upvote.
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I hope you didn't understand my post as an accusation. At least that is not my intention. Thanks for writing and sharing your bot. I'm trying to set up one, but haven't succeeded yet. I also stated that autovoting does bring some value to steem, like you also described, and that it is inevitable.
What I was trying to say is, that it looks like autovoting (the fact that autovoting will certainly happen, not specifically your bot) will skew the results, and in the worst case this will become a reciprocal autovoting circle, which in the end only harms everyone long-term. I was wanting to hear other's opinnions about the phenomenom, and if they see it as a potential problem. So thanks for your reply!
It's also true what you say about the first payout. Things will become much more dynamic after that, but maybe the good writers can still be identified. We'll see.
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I didn't see it as an accusation at all. I just thought I'd share my thoughts on the matter. You have to assume people will act in their best interest (maybe I thought I would obtain more rewards by sharing the bot than not, for instance), and to be upset that they are using all the tools at their disposal to 'play the game,' so to speak, of a well-defined system is silly, especially if you're the creator of the game.
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The game theory of the system needs reworking in some of its aspects that can be "gamed".
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Everything that can be gamed will be gamed. I am just wondering what will be the mechanism that will stop this from becoming a reciprocal up-voting circle to the demise of the whole. It seems dan isn't too worried about this, which is good, because he is an expert in economics and game theory.
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If you're still interested, I'm working on promoting my series on the game theory of Steem; I'll be looking at questions like this and analyzing where Steem is vulnerable to being gamed.
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This could be a problem now, that there are only a few whales that everyone wants to upvote. But if steemit becomes succesfull then we could have 1.000 whales and houndreds of posts per minute.. you could also have a very viral post from a non-whale that bots wont catch. There are also very few people with the knowledge and the skills to create a bot, most people will just use steam as a blog... So, in conclusion I wouldnt worry to much about the bots in the long run.
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I agree, the problem of bots is magnified at present because there are so few user.
When there are millions of users, we'll have a better idea how spam bots will play out on this platform and how it can best be addressed. It's social media none of the major players are immune to it.
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Edit: I thought there was a fixed halving in vote power for each vote, but I was incorrect and Steem isn't vulnerable to sybil voting attack.
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I'd invite you to follow my series on the game theory of Steem; I'll be looking at questions like this and doing a rigorous (yet approachable) analysis of how well aligned the incentives in Steem are to what we think they "should" be. I hope to see you around!
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my account is upvoting by itself automatically, my voting power keeps draining. can someone explain please?
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Look at your account history in https://steemd.com/@steemtoons. You have 100% voting power.
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yes, that's bcz I fixed it!
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