My Take On HardFork 17

in witness-category •  8 years ago 

I will keep this short.
For reference, you can find the HF 17 Release Notes here

What I do not like

All comments are paid out 7 days after creation and there is no longer a second payout window.

99% of votes are cast in the first 7 days after creation. This elimates the need for a second payout to accumulate value to a post and simplifies logic significantly.

  • First, there was basically no community discussion about this change. The dev team just put it into HF17 and did not even care to reply to those witnesses that raised some criticism about the change well before the final release

  • Second, it is pretty obvious how the data presented is extremely biased depending on the current steemit UI and the underlying blockchain reward mechanism.
    You can't really expect to see more than a few rare votes on contents older than a couple days, just because the UI is focused on showing new, recent and trending post on their first payout.
    The 30days trending page is very rarely used (and now it is even removed from the site), and I think both because

    1. the daily posts aren't so much that users end up seeing a post for the first time only after the first payout (so due to a low number of users and even lower number of content creators) and
    2. there is really no incentive to vote during the second payout period since there is no curation reward
  • Third, Steem and Steemit are two different things.
    I can understand (I would not be a fan tho) if Steemit.con wants to focus only on certain kind of contents that seem to be "valuable" only during a narrow period after their creation and then "lose" their value entirely after just a few days.
    This doesn't mean that the Steem Blockchain should limit itself and other possible competitor UI and websites to focus on all those contents that really doesn't lose much of their value for quite a long long time. Just think about useful Q/A, guides, tutorials and such... why should they lose value and possible reward after just 1 week?
    It is definitely pretty common to read and use even a years-old tutorial, they are still useful and very valuable.

This third point shows how even the current reward payout mechanism is not ideal. If a change needs to be done, imho, it should be towards an open system where users can upvote and rewards content creators no matter how old the content is, and possibly do so even more than once per post.

The fact is that the reward payout mechanism is/could be a crucial point of the entire system, it needs to be designed more openly as possible to make it works for different kind of content and scenarios... Back to the first point, it really needs much more community discussions and open eyes on what we want in the future... do not limit the entire blockchain because of how you intend to use it just for steemit


There is now a comment reward fund separate from posts.

We want discussion to be incentivized. Currently, comments are only claiming 2% of the content rewards and there are more comments than posts. Comments will receive 38% of the content reward fund. This change should incentivize commenting, engaging in, and curating discussions.

Both witnesses and the Community pointed out how this is not needed, at least not now.

I am against directing a fixed percentage to comments, and even more if that fixed value is so drastically high compared to the current one. The fact that it is hard-coded and we would need to wait months for change it back to some more reasonable value, it just add another strong reason to be against it.

I think it is way better to have a single reward pool, leaving the distribution between posts and comments to be dynamically allocated with a new, better, much wanted, linear reward curve... A better UI for comments could help too.

Start KISS, and add some level of complexity only if real issues arise. Do not start it obscure and complex just because of theoretical issues that may never present itself or be somewhat relevant considering the whole system

What I would like but isn't strictly necessary now

  • Changes to the Reward Curves

The only reason why I am saying that it isn't strictly necessary now is because of the no-whales-voting initiative.
If that initiative continues, the bad effects of the current n^2 curve will be (and already is) much smaller. If the dev team really wants more time to make it "right", we probably can wait until the next HF.

That being said, imho, it would be way better to postpone the HF17 to a few more days so the dev team can finally listen to the community and witnesses demand and include the changes needed for a simple linear reward curve. KISS.


Community to decide

  • If you support my view, you can also support my witness by voting for bhuz

  • If the community decides to support HF17 as it is now instead, once the HF is passed I will still upgrade my witness node and keep supporting the network and the new changes as requested by the community itself through witness voting


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You know what? These are valuable criticisms that should be listened to. I'm resteeming and encourage other people to do so. Hopefully @sneak will take time to answer this.

I'm personally very excited about the arbitrary reward mechanism.

One point that I agree with you is that we should have more arbitrary variables that should be left to the devs of platforms to decide.

I don't know the feasibility of this but if we can leave those decisions to each individual projects that are being developped, we have less chance that someone will require their own blockchain to attain their objectives.

Thank you cryptoctopus.
Yes I think the blockchain should be as open as possible to different kind of projects that may arise.
Limiting the underlying blockchain just because Steemit do not see value on a certain kind of contents, seems wrong to me.

Thank you for ReSteeming @cryptoctopus....otherwise this post would have been missed.

Strip out the 7-day payout and the comment rewards pool and I think most people would accept the hard fork. Get the next one started right now with the rewards curve change - and nothing else. That could be done in a couple of weeks and ready for release.

After that, we can discuss payout time frames. I'm of the opinion that a 48-72 hour pay period would be sufficient. In addition to that, a tipping option on each post would help users earn money on older content and would make tipping more intuitive across the platform. A "tipping purse" that can be reloaded from the main wallet daily would probably be ideal.

As far as a separate pool for comments goes - it's not needed at all, in my opinion. Flattening curves and treating parent-child posts the same by the code would be best.

Yes, I also think that the majority of the witnesses would agree on the HF without those two elements

At first I was against tipping, but you are starting to get me to flip.

I agree with your points. Resteemed :-)

k

Thank you for posting @bhuz.

Your well written article is easy to understand. One does hope your recommendations are given a hearing.....especially with regard to item changes which are not easy to reverse.

Steemians appreciate communication from the witnesses and discussion regarding changes.

Thank you for what you do for Steemit. Cheers.

do not limit the entire blockchain because of how you intend to use it just for steemit

This is exactly my sentiment. Steem is not steemit, the steem blockchain will have hundreds of differents use case, if you limit payout to a single 7 day period there are lots of use cases that won't be practical.
The current 24h/30 days is for sure not the best but it is a lot more polyvalent, those who need quick payout can have it and those who need longer payout period can also have it.

I have the same issue with comment pool, the comment pool is basically limiting use cases to websites with a blog/comment structure, it is much better to have a standardize and simple chain. Comments are also being rewarded right now so I'm not sure why we need this..

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Thank you for your inputs.

I agree with everything you said here. For what is worth, I'm voting for you.

Thank you for your support!

Comments will receive 38% of the content reward fund. Does this mean all commenters of that post get the equal share of the 38 %? If so, I'm all for that. At first, I was like oh no... 38% of reward goes to commenters... this could hurt authors... receiving less $$$ from each post. Though in the long term, if Steem goes up in value, this won't be a big deal.

SP delegation is bad,...it entrenches the whale control of what passes as content on the platform.

The scope of SP delegation is actually the opposite.
It will allow whales to delegate their SP to other users (like minnows). Those users will be able to vote with the delegated power on whatever contents they like, and they will also get all curation reward coming from their votes.

Quickly advantaging their curation over everybody else that the whales didn't deign to bless with their grace,....