Thanks for sharing this valuable information with us all @sorin.cristescu!
I am just recently trying to approach curation for profit and not just use the upvote as a "like" button, so this was a very useful lesson.
There are still somethings that I need to understand better, about curation and author rewards...
I am going to ask you @sorin.cristescu because you seam very knowledgeable about these things;
For instance one thing I find very strange is that the reward amount under posts are always sinking/shrinking, I have been told it has to do with the SBD going down in value, but now (yesterday) the SBD doubled in value, but the reward under my post are still at the same low level...?
Have I misunderstood something?
It feels kind of weird...
Anyway thanks for dropping my name in the post, I must say both you and @yallapapi are true inspirational forces around here, I only started to experiment with bots, so we will see what happens, but I am hoping that I will be able to grow on this platform, and if I could make a few extra SBDs a week I would be very happy. And if STEEM goes to the moon I think we all would be very happy! 😁😁😁😁
Cheers! And again thanks for the post!
I only have a fuzzy understanding of the pricing issues. What I believe I know goes like that: in order for Steemit to display a reward value, it needs to take the price of Steem and SBD from ... somewhere.
One can easily understand that it cannot be an external source, the steem ecosystem needs to be decentralized and autonomous, it cannot rely on Bloomberg, Reuters or Coinmarketcap to get STEEM and SBD price information.
Therefore this is a task required of the witnesses. I don't quite get in detail how this works (it's in the whitepaper but I can't make sense of it) but they publish a "price feed" which is 3.5 days forward-looking (to prevent price manipulation. If you look at this snapshot of the first 7 witnesses you can see that they indicate a ratio going from 1.83 SBD per steem to 1.988 SBD per steem.
Somehow an average of all these price feeds is used by the blockchain engine to generate SBD for the reward pool (where a variable mix of SBD and steem are poured). I would venture that one has to look at the code to see precisely how this works.
The rewards on your posts vary with this price feed average. The "$" is supposed to represent SBD but in reality it doesn't, it's a mix of steem and SBD taken from the reward pool (for 50%) and vests (labelled "steem power" for the other 50%)
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Thanks for taking the time to answer @sorin.cristescu...
That whole thing seams slightly "fishy" to me...
You suggested "bot-voting" later not directly after posting a post?
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I "suggested" ?
Depends on anyone's objective. A guy like @brandonscalera for instance would prepare his post and his transfers by looking at steembottracker and as soon as his post was published on the blockchain he would send SBD to the bots that accept to vote on very young posts (less than 30'). This way, he minimizes the curation gains of the bots and maximizes his own earnings as author. Fair enough (who cares about the bots curation gains anyway). By doing so he's just neutral toward those who read and upvote his posts either. They are going to get 1/8th of their VP as "$" (which is then divided by the price of steem to give SP)
What I'm doing is making a pledge (rather than "suggesting"). I'm saying: if you upvote me, you'll gain more from curation than with other people because I'll let some time pass (thus giving you time to read and assess whether the post is worth of your upvote) before using bots.
In other words, I'm not going to look at maximizing my financial author gains but rather balance them toward intangible "community" gains.
Whether that's a good thing to do or not, it's my choice and everyone is free to make his own opinion, I'm not pretending to be right :-)
Those who would have upvoted before the bots could get up to 3 times their VP as SP. Even those voting after the bots would still get the usual 1/8 of the VP used, as with every other upvote (nothing special here) ...
There's nothing fishy, IMO. The guys from Steemit thought of an algorithm that aimed (probably) to minimize abuse. @jga analyzed that algorithm and pointed out a way for curators and authors to cooperate for better results ...
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Wow, thanks @sorin.cristescu for the long answer, maybe "suggested" was the wrong word. (Sorry).
I guess I just liked your approach it is nice, (for us humans who want to curate your posts).
I have been stressed about making all transfers to various bots as soon as I post the post,
under the belief that getting a few strong upvotes fast would push me into hot or trending.
But now that I have seen the reward amount slowly decreasing day by day, I am making the connection to "the unwritten rule of not up-voting posts that are older then 3,5 days"... Maybe it is better to just wait and then "release the bots" on day 2 or 3?
Let the humans get their curation and also prevent "algorithm decay" of the reward from the bid-bots?
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Fair question. Algorithm decay has to do with the constant erosion of the price of Steem lately. If it starts growing again, rewards should be growing as well.
Philosophically speaking, I prefer a collective approach - building a community and growing together than the free-for-all, "I'm looking to maximize my own rewards and I assume everybody else is doing the same" taken by people coming from the Ayn Rand and Austrian school (lots of people coming from that part of the beliefs spectrum on Steemit).
I don't say their approach is worse and mine is better. The French have a saying "il faut de tout pour faire un monde". I think it's healthy that there are people with different approaches around here.
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Yeah, I hope the "post reward decay" is correlated to the ups and downs of steem/steem dollars,
(not only the downs)...
I also like the fact that this place has people with all sorts of different approaches to life and money, but I like your effort to collaborate with the collective, it is inspiring. I think it can be win-win to cooperate, I guess that is what @yallapapi would call "circle jerking" ha ha. =)
People can say a lot of stuff about Ayn Rand and her extreme selfishness, but she has the most crazy eyes I have ever seen, almost sexy in a creepy way, she looks so fanatical... I love her eyes... Ha ha...
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Never watched her speaking. 3 minutes into the interview one can already see that her philosophy, certainly useful when formulated in the 50-ies, has been made obsolete by the progress of human understanding.
Faith and emotions are integral and, I should say, quite central to the human condition. By now, after so many centuries, I'm pretty confident they have been baked into our genes. Exploring how far pure reason and objectivism can lead us was certainly a worthy undertaking, half a century ago.
I'm certain it is about time we regain some balance and start integrating both reason and emotion into our assessment of what it is and what it should mean to be human.
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I am not a fan of her ideas, just think she looked cool. lol 😃👻
But she does have a point that it can be hard to help other people if you cannot help yourself first, something that can be true in some cases...
But in other cases a healthy symbiosis in between people cooperating and helping out with what they can be a very good way of getting things done.
We are emotional beings trying to be reasonable and civilized, and I guess it has always been a struggle to find some kind of healthy balance for ourselves and for society as a whole...
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As @sorin.cristescu pointed, the amount that you see under the post is calculated with the median price of the last 3.5 days (see the price on steemnow.com clicking at the corner)... if today the prices go up you have to wait some days to see it in the posts.
The witnesses define the price. The blockchain takes all of them and uses the median.
And how do witnesses calculate prices? they take them from exchanges (bitrex, poloniex, coinmarketcap, etc). Each one is free to set the price he deems correct.
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Cool @jga now I understand the whole thing a bit better, "median price"... Makes sense... Sorry to @steemit if I was a bit negative, just felt like the "median price" was more responsive to the dips... But it was probably just me...
Anyway this whole "witness thing", who should I vote for the get the most "correct everything"?
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I don't know, but I think all of them put correct prices (with some differences), then no worries at the moment IMO. When I vote for a witness I see other characteristics like the work they do and the communities they support. Regards.
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Thanks for your reply @jga!
I am guessing a person with a deeper technical understanding of the STEEM blockchain and a strong will to improve the Steemit-platform for all users, would be a good witness to vote for?
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Exactly, yes!
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