I'll take this point about CURIE to say that it is essentially a Delegated Curation Guild.
The reason there are only one or two of these so far (Smooth and NGC) is this:
Whales that are not voting a lot may be doing so as a means of abstaining from rewards and giving minnows a chance to grow influence.
Whales that are voting a lot may be doing so as a means of projects like CURIE to give minnows a chance to grow influence.
Both parties are seeking the same goals of gamifying / growing the platform.
It just happens that the difference in means creates a strong cognitive dissonance between the two groups.
Delegated Curation Guilds (DCGs) are potentially a solution to the cognitive dissonance by allowing both types of whales to continue doing (abstaining from voting, voting actively, or “hiring” curators) what they were doing while bringing the available voting power into the market in either a profit seeking or altruistic manner.
Edited to add the this:*
Richard, no one meant any offense anywhere, including CURIE - If Val's response was emotional as trying to protect me then that's on me.
By describing the Curation Guild I was trying to make the case that curation can get better. Any whale of the same size can do the same thing nextgencrypto is doing, but instead most are not voting and using that as a community benefitting strategy. I hope you see that.
We can do better on community engagement for proposed changes. Let's do better. (We are hiring: https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemitjobs/new-steemit-job-posting-community-and-social-media-manager)
I appreciate Richard and the community for bringing all the time and work that you are
I see a lot of cognitive dissonance mentioned in Richard's post. I hope he gets more than a textbook definition in response to his critique.
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No one meant any offense anywhere - If Val's response was emotional as he was trying to protect me then that's on me.
I was trying to make the case that curation can get better. Any whale of the same size can do the same thing nextgencrypto is doing, but instead most are not voting and using that as a community benefitting strategy. I hope you see that.
We can do better on community engagement for proposed changes. Let's do better.
I appreciate you, richard and the community for bringing all the time and work that you are
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Damn give it to him with out sugar :) Yes Ned need something with more weight in that response.
Are we still trying to keep steemit decentralized? Because its looking to be centralized like any other corporate business, with all these unknown changes and unfair wages....
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You didn't really address any of the points that @steemship made though. This just makes the point about being out of touch. I wish you would actually listen to what people are saying.
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I was so excited when I saw there was a reply, and then...
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That being the case, the community (in the form of that project, RHW, and others) is getting the job done and the feature is not needed.
If and when problems arise that get in the way of these efforts, allow the community to bring that to the team's attention and then (and only then) request additional support from the platform. Otherwise, you very much risk undercutting not only these specific efforts, but the willingness of those in the community to do anything at all, because every time we do, the team drops some new rule changes or imposes its own top-down vision of how things should work. That is exactly why I had to reduce my own investment in curation efforts, because I saw team meddling as imminent, threatening to once again scramble the rules, and invalidate any investment I did make.
There are things only the team can do, most notably recruiting new users (because the team controls the 50% of the SP stake designated to fund new user accounts). Or improving the implementation and deployment of the platform as it exists (I still experience frequent stalls and connection problems, for example), or completing the implementation of additions to the platform that have been promised, such as a marketplace. Please focus your efforts there and let the community do what it not only can do, but does better than those operating from within the team "bubble".
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Retention is pretty low right now so spending money on recruting users may be not optimal.
Btw what criteria do use saying community does certain things better?
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By recruiting new users I include retention. A huge factor in retention is who you recruit and how you recruit them. Even if we acknowledge that some aspects of retention are impaired by platform issues that need to be addressed (and done so in a manner that does not piss off the users who are already here), there are clearly users who have retained well. Understanding better who those users are and why they are not leaving would allow focusing on trying to recruit more such users. This would make recruitment more effective. You could start by figuring out better way so to reduce sign up fraud. It is still a huge issue, a large percentage of the signups, and it costs money with little likely effectiveness.
The other thing that is leading to poor retention is a small and shrinking user base. As users slowly leave (which is inevitable in any site, no matter how good, if only due to life changes and such) and are not being sufficiently replaced by new users, it becomes a smaller and smaller community. You now see the same progressively-smaller group of people posting and commenting. A small community has less value so new users sign up, see there are only six (exaggeration, or perhaps, extrapolation) people here and they all know each other, and leave. It is absolutely essential to spend money on bringing new users ASAP (including focusing on users who will retain) otherwise the users who are here will continue to slowly leave, not be replaced, and you will be left with a shell of a platform and no users.
The criteria I'm using are two:
Yes, there are things only the team can do, and that includes platform consensus changes, but the approach to doing them needs to change, and change radically and quickly if you don't want to alienate 100% of the users (and I can tell you my perception of his disposition is that when @steemship starts calling you out, you passed the point of widespread user frustration quite a ways back). That means platform changes defined and developed in a more inclusive manner, with meaningful community input and feedback (such as an advisory board drawn from the user community), and sufficient time for the community to understand what is being proposed, how it affects them, and to give meaningful feedback (i.e. much slower). As such the ability of the team to effectively (without causing more harm than good) address needs on the platform in a timely manner without stirring up unintended but still inevitable frustration and hostility is already limited and becoming much more so.
If the community can do it, than let the community do it and save your limited budget of acceptable and accepted top-down changes for when it is really needed. Pick your battles.
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@steemship - this response, which lacks any substance towards the points you bring up, is confirming with each passing second that the Steemit team absolutely needs one or more Communicators working full time to address this stuff.
Based on the outflows from the power downs, I would hope there is enough capital to support that.
Big stage, gents. Time to lead.
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I don't understand how whales that are not voting are helping minnows? As far as I see it -
The author rewards they generate greatly exceed the curation rewards they receive. At least 3-4 times, even if a whale is first to upvote. So for every Steem Power a whale earns in curation rewards, the minnow earns 3x as much. Granted, some minnows may choose to cash out SBDs instead of Powering Up, but still the SP earned exceeds the curation rewards SP earned by whales.
They could simply vote within the first few minutes if they wanted to bypass their curation rewards. Or as alluded to above, vote on posts late, that have already gotten some attention from other whales. If they vote on a post that has already gained some attention, author's rewards they generate could be 10x as much as their curation rewards.
They could donate the curation rewards back to the author.
The rate their Steem Power is growing well exceeds the rate at which minnows are growing influence if they effectively do nothing. The Top 15 whales own 25 Million Steem Power. Every week, their Steem Power grows at least 0.5 Million (and higher than 1 Million right now, given inflation rate is much higher). That's more than the total holdings of 94% accounts on Steem. Net effect - there's zero re-distribution of wealth.
Please let me know if I'm missing out on something here. As far as I see it, there are only two ways for whales to help minnows gain influence - voting on them, or selling (ideally, donating) them Steem to Power Up.
I'm eager to hear more about the Delegated Curation Guilds proposal. I hope Steemit, Inc. take Richard's advice and explain clearly, precisely, as well as in detail. We are still waiting for a clear explanation on HF14's Vote Balancing. Something that shows clear case studies of before and after, in charts. As, many have pointed out here, not more than a dozen people know the algorithms and metrics behind this unpopular move, and that's a big problem.
I understand Val's comments were made in the heat of the moment, but they hurt the company's reputation badly, particularly as we are still waiting for an apology.
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You are missing one thing...the more whales that vote the more worthless every other lesser vote becomes... usually by a couple of orders of magnitude.
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This is a very important critique of the planned changes. I hope the Steem Team will read it and consider the questions you are posing.
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If @razvanelulmarin is right which I'm pretty sure he is, not voting is helping those who are voted by other whales. His post is interesting and people could gain from reading it.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@razvanelulmarin/i-will-become-a-whale-in-24hours-here-s-how
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the hard fork changes in 14 are perfect, a great way to bust apart these curation guilds, they are like political parties and not good for steemit as they have too much human control and emotions involved, these types of guilds are better off being handled by technological solutions, and i look forwad to those changes in hard fork 15
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That's an interesting perspective. However, to create a technological model of what curation should look like in order to make curation "fair" to all parties and remove the "human bias", is an unrealistic goal.
The Steemit community is a community of people first and foremost, and as such its' attitudes are dynamic and alive. Trying to define rigid, universally applicable rules for how curation should be done cannot be done without stepping on somebody's toes.
Curation, guilds, balance of power - these are inherently political considerations and trying to apply a set of rules to guide, manipulate or influence the community towards one specific model of curation stifles expression. It must be allowed to evolve based on the aggregate expressions voiced in the community.
If that aggregate fails to represent the principles of individuals, be they whales, dolphins or minnows, they can take action to change that aggregate attitude or go elsewhere and start over. Before anyone decides to take their toys and go to a new sandbox they would be wise to evaluate their principles and make sure such a move is necessary, or adjust their principles if not.
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Curation guild (human) = Delegated voting pool (technological)
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What do you think about this idea. A day of no whale votes ( you could still do 1 percent votes) then we can see why the platform would look like with the no whales?
a day of abstinence will answer the question
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If u have so much trust on Steem, why r u converting your Steem & SBD into bitcoin? Is not bitcoin dead?
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