Steemit how can this thing be workable long term?

[r0ach]

I'm looking at a bot - or someone with bot-like-behavior that enters a large number of threads to make some one liner comment or throw a meme photo

https://steemit.com/@weenis/transfers

His account got to 100$ in something like a day.

The system needs tweaking or something. Bot-resistance should be the strong point.

It seems pretty broken:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@mary777/wang-the-steemit-bot

The fact that there is no real Sybil prevention means it will be gamed to hell and back and will turn into a giant circle jerk of bots.  Delegates/curators/whatever you call them will probably be running the things on the down low.

I already wrote upthread that users could elect to use a bot also, which fights that bot by downvoting its posts.

This problem is solvable.

It is interesting that normal users are now afraid to downvote obvious bot spam posts:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@winstonwolfe/so-downvoting-a-bot-gets-you-downvoted-wtf-is-that

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[TaunSew]

I think you are all envious of the success of the Larimer brothers.  The Larimer brothers are the only ones bringing crypto to the masses. 

[iamnotback]

Data on the whales:

https://steemit.com/analytics/@clement/the-steemit-whales-analytics-all-the-data-from-the-firsts-100-whales-of-steemit

[smooth]

Data on the whales:

https://steemit.com/analytics/@clement/the-steemit-whales-analytics-all-the-data-from-the-firsts-100-whales-of-steemit

That chart reaks of Sybil attack.

Anyway, here's some new data from alexa:



http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/steemit.com

[iamnotback]

I have an idea for solving the bot-spam issue. We could alter the voting algorithm to make issuing a "flag as spammer" much more "costly" and if we have a new "Trashcan" button next to comments that confirms after clicking it as follows:

Are you sure you wish our bot to automatically issue a downvote on your behalf on this post and every post the spammer makes in the future?

Please note that each time a (up or down) vote is (even those automatically) issued, your voting power is temporarily reduced for a window of time (thus reducing the power of other votes you make during that proximate window of time), so "flag as spammer" should only be issued if you are very sure the content is bot-spam or the author is always highly undesirable.

(Note you may remove this choice from your Trashcan at any time)

[I'm Sure]  [Cancel]

I need to think of a more succinct text for the above message. Or perhaps we could automatically detect that a voter is often downvoting a particular author and never upvoting that same author. Then automatically add to the Trashcan with or without doing the above confirmation.

The way voting works (or I think should work) is that your voting power is stake-weighted, and your voting power is split by all the votes you issue in each tabulation period (which afaics idealing should be a sliding window filter).

[iamnotback]

My post for today... another proposal. People seem to like those more than my attempts at being funny/satirical posts.

https://steemit.com/proposal/@coinhoarder/steem-proposal-create-different-types-of-posts-for-different-use-cases-greater-than-first-use-case-steemit-reviews

I got my upvote in before your 24 hour reward period expired.

I couldn't read it all because I am rushed but I agree with the general idea to serve a 1000 niches.

Voting power would need to be more linearly computed than current though for the reviews to not be overly influenced by whales.

I would strongly suggest not writing the following:

If you like this proposal, and want me to continue to brainstorming and posting ways to improve Steem and Steemit, then please consider up voting some of my other blog posts. Thanks for your support!

[iamnotback]

The minute speculators stop buying Steem it may collapse because there is no business model or revenue source only the hope speculators will value a site attracting users and not use common sense.

The platform itself may not have ads, but the content itself can be ad-style / ad-supported even include gray-advertising. So, in that sense, purchasing steem power also gives you the power to commercialize products and services by reaching a broader audience.

Unfortunately Steem will have a limited future if content is manipulated in that way...

Digg faced problems due to so-called "power users" who would manipulate the article recommendation features... making it impossible to have genuine content from non-power users appear on the front page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg

Social media site Soshable graphed 118 stories on the once-fabled Digg front page in three days after the new iteration's release. Six publishers and one influential technology pundit control the lion share of Digg's most important space, it shows.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/pda/2010/aug/31/digg-redesign-revolt

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2012/07/12/digg-once-worth-164-million-sold-to-betaworks-for-500k/#6927d6682c66

Unfortunately having content ranked not on what is the most popular but what has the most money behind it will effectively result in censorship because whales or large corporate interests can dictate what users primarily view.

Media integrity

Media integrity refers to the ability of a media outlet to serve the public interest and democratic process, making it resilient to institutional corruption within the media system, economy of influence, conflicting dependence and political clientelism. Such a situation enables excessive instrumentalisation of the media for particular political interests, which is subverting democratic role of the media.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownership

The Steemit system ensures viewers will in the not too distant future see a front page of either advertising or government sponsored political propaganda & views not supported by the largest corporate/political interests will be buried.

Assuming it survives to that stage this process will alienate users and freedom minded contributors. This was the downfall of Digg and also one of the reasons Reddit has had user revolts recently.

I proposed a hypothetical solution for that:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@anonymint/improving-steem-s-rankings-to-cater-to-diverse-content-preferences

In my solution, if whales don't have similar preferences to your own, then you do not see their voting power in the rankings you view.

Note my solution doesn't remove the stake-weighting of voting power within your coterie (nor overall for the author's payout), but it makes it less possible for whales to influence everyone's vote by controlling what everyone sees at the top of their personalized coterie.

It is not desirable to remove stake-weighted voting power because otherwise there's no resource to limit spam, unless you switched to pay-per-activity (e.g. proof-of-work submitted on each activity).

Note the non-linear weighting of total voting power for each post is an orthogonal issue to the stake-weighting. It has multiple effects including giving whales more influence and a feedback vortex (voters vote on what they see at the top because buried posts aren't seen) causing a few top posts to be paid much more than most of the rest. My proposal above dilutes these effects.

[smooth]

Alpha release of non-web client: https://steemit.com/piston/@xeroc/piston-web-first-open-source-steem-gui---searching-for-alpha-testers#

[iamnotback]

Steem will generate no revenue in 2016 and have MUCH higher expenses than Reddit because it's paying users for content.

Incorrect. I added the following to my blog post to explain it:

Steem is generating revenue for STEEM POWER investors taken from those who hold STEEM instead of STEEM POWER. We need to upgrade our conceptualization of revenue. Revenue is any gain in value not paid by the long-term investors! It is actually quite a clever paradigm-shift innovation on the definition of a revenue generating investment.

Yes but as I said,  

The minute speculators stop buying Steem it may collapse because there is no business model or revenue source only the hope speculators will value a site attracting users and not use common sense.

So you're just relying on a greater fool/speculator buying Steem to support those expenses because there is no actual underlying business model or revenue source.

Not if they can generate significant transaction volume. Please read the rest of section that I linked you to.

Whereas, STEEM holders are paid nothing while the total supply of tokens is debased by 100% annually. Thus, STEEM holders lose 0.19% per day³, 1.34% per week, and 50% per year of the total Steem market capitalization.

https://poloniex.com/lending#BTC

Why do you think borrowers on Polo are rarely willing to pay >0.02% a day to borrow?
(Because there's very few investments speculators confidently think can consistenly outperform that borrowing rate.)

Yet you're expecting a greater fool to continue buying Steem even though there is no revenue or business model and at a daily cost of >0.1%...

Unfortunately once speculators start to look into it more I think you will find demand for Steem drying up.

You didn't even read carefully my blog post which I told you refutes your points:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@anonymint/it-s-so-easy-to-become-a-millionaire-with-steem

Those holding STEEM (and not STEEM POWER) are doing it for short-term price speculation. They are diluted every block, thus providing the funding and cash flow. The others who MUST hold STEEM are those who need to transact in STEEM. Again while holding STEEM (even for short periods of time), they are diluted every block, thus providing the funding and cash flow.

Please don't make me repeat the same point 4 times.

[iamnotback]

I wrote about the password security issue upthread and this adds to the discussion:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemitblog/steemit-to-update-password-policy

Deferring to LastPass will not be popular and will radically increase the attrition rate of people who abandon at the signup stage.

We don't want to be storing the user's private key(s) on the server, because the hackers will be incentivized to hack the server and get all the users' private keys.

The best solution I can think of is to save the private key on the user's device and keep a copy in cold storage. If the user loses their copy of the private key file, they can then go through a process to get a copy out of cold storage. For example, they could pay something and provide KYC documentation perhaps both scanned and in videochat. Users with large balances would be encouraged to adopt a hardware wallet.

[CoinHoarder]

So, liquidity incentives look like they may go bye bye. That frees up $95,040 a day. What would be a better use of this money?

What if the money could be used to pay electable curators? I see two benefits:

• This would even out the money distributed from front page posts, which make thousands, to posts making pennies or dollars.
• It would also diversify the content that makes it to the front page.

Electable curators would be elected by stake, similar to how delegates are elected, and each person elected would receive a special token named DSP (delegated SP).

DSP would not earn any curation rewards for up votes, and elected curators would not be able to power it down, but instead each elected curator would receive a set wage per day for curating.

However, when it comes to content curation rewards for content creators, DSP would be one and the same as SP.

$95,040 per day is a lot of money. You could realistically pay 2,376 part time electable curators $40 per day.

They could each receive an amount of DSP equal to the amount of SP that has voted for them separately, or they could each receive an equal amount of DSP as determined by some equation (like... the average of the top 101 SP account totals, with the #1 spot (steemit) not being a part of the equation.)

The whales may not like the idea, but they really need to think of ways to make the system more fair before it collapses on them.

Just another half baked idea from yours truly...  

What do you think?

[smooth]

I wrote about the password security issue upthread and this adds to the discussion:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemitblog/steemit-to-update-password-policy

Deferring to LastPass will not be popular and will radically increase the attrition rate of people who abandon at the signup stage.

We don't want to be storing the user's private key(s) on the server, because the hackers will be incentivized to hack the server and get all the users' private keys.

The best solution I can think of is to save the private key on the user's device and keep a copy in cold storage. If the user loses their copy of the private key file, they can then go through a process to get a copy out of cold storage. For example, they could pay something and provide KYC documentation perhaps both scanned and in videochat. Users with large balances would be encouraged to adopt a hardware wallet.

Yeah it seems like they are on the wrong track. This is better:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@arhag/a-response-to-steemit-to-update-password-policy

That frees up $95,040 a day. What would be a better use of this money?

Leave it unallocated at least until it is determined that some sort of replacement liquidity incentives aren't needed. Lack of liquidity is potentially a catastrophic problem in this system, with most of the supply locked up tight, and the pegged asset requiring high liquidity to serve its purpose (being convertible in practice at close to the pegged price).

If replacement liquidity incentives are needed then my vote goes to elected liquidity providers at this point (who would be charged not only with providing general and useful liquidity but also explicitly spending their allocated funds to help maintain the peg). I don't know of a good structure for autonomous liquidity incentives.

[iamnotback]

So far, the most significant flaws I observe thus far in Steem are:

• There is too much selling pressure because users get paid 50% of blogging rewards in STEEM (and miners/liquidity providers) which can be cashed out immediately, and this amounts to > 50% debasement per year that can be sold. The users who are coming to earn money because they need or want money, so they are likely to cash out as much as they can. If rewards were predominately paid in STEEM POWER which has a 1 year weighted average divestment schedule (2 years total), then users might be less incentivized to signup?
• The dysfunctional voting+ranking system and the whales having too much influence needs overhaul, but at least this is probably doable. However there is a tension between the promotional hype value of very high rewards (that motivate users to join) and fairer distribution of rewards.
• Eternal 100% debasement is not sustainable. The debasement rate should be supported by actual transaction fees and drop to that level at some point.
• The 80-90% "pre"-mine is resented by many potential investors who could otherwise be supporting the funding model while transactions are given time to be developed and ramp up. Note that new signups need to have some tokens, else they have no stake-weight to even post or get started with. Perhaps we could use UNPROFITABLE proof-of-work mining instead to get them enough tokens to get rolling in a decentralized paradigm?
• Nothing is incentivizing transfers other than cashing out. I have a radical proposal in mind to improve this.

That frees up $95,040 a day. What would be a better use of this money?

Leave it unallocated at least until it is determined that some sort of replacement liquidity incentives aren't needed. Lack of liquidity is potentially a catastrophic problem in this system, with most of the supply locked up tight, and the pegged asset requiring high liquidity to serve its purpose (being convertible in practice at close to the pegged price).

If replacement liquidity incentives are needed then my vote goes to elected liquidity providers at this point (who would be charged not only with providing general and useful liquidity but also explicitly spending their allocated funds to help maintain the peg). I don't know of a good structure for autonomous liquidity incentives.

Dump the pegged asset STEEM DOLLAR.  It is entirely unneeded for where we are headed...

If we don't get users to use STEEM POWER as their unit-of-account, then the entire concept is DOA.

[CoinHoarder]

That frees up $95,040 a day. What would be a better use of this money?

Leave it unallocated at least until it is determined that some sort of replacement liquidity incentives aren't needed. Lack of liquidity is potentially a catastrophic problem in this system, with most of the supply locked up tight, and the pegged asset requiring high liquidity to serve its purpose (being convertible in practice at close to the pegged price).

If replacement liquidity incentives are needed then my vote goes to elected liquidity providers at this point (who would be charged not only with providing general and useful liquidity but also explicitly spending their allocated funds to help maintain the peg). I don't know of a good structure for autonomous liquidity incentives.

Pretend for a moment that it was determined that liquidity incentives are not necessary.

Would the idea make content curation more fair for content creators? Or is the idea broken somehow?

[smooth]

That frees up $95,040 a day. What would be a better use of this money?

Leave it unallocated at least until it is determined that some sort of replacement liquidity incentives aren't needed. Lack of liquidity is potentially a catastrophic problem in this system, with most of the supply locked up tight, and the pegged asset requiring high liquidity to serve its purpose (being convertible in practice at close to the pegged price).

If replacement liquidity incentives are needed then my vote goes to elected liquidity providers at this point (who would be charged not only with providing general and useful liquidity but also explicitly spending their allocated funds to help maintain the peg). I don't know of a good structure for autonomous liquidity incentives.

Pretend for a moment that it was determined that liquidity incentives are not necessary.

Would the idea make content curation more fair for content creators? Or is the idea broken somehow?

I think the idea of paid curators running around deciding what gets voted how detracts greatly from user engagement. Whales will become totally irrelevant when the user base and posting volume increases by 10x or 100x or even 1000x. There just aren't that many whales and whales have the same voting power restrictions as anyone else. A rare whale sighting will be a big deal.

[iamnotback]

Whales will become totally irrelevant when the user base and posting volume increases by 10x or 100x or even 1000x. There just aren't that many whales and whales have the same voting power restrictions as anyone else. A rare whale sighting will be a big deal.

You presume all whales are benevolent. Stake will eventually end up in a power-law distribution, because perpetual 100% debasement is not sustainable (even the transactions fees of the entire earth could not support it).

Also it is incorrect to say they play by the same rules. 3 x 3 = 9 is not 1/2 of 6 x 6 = 36.

Any way, I have proposed a partial solution.

[AlexGR]

So, liquidity incentives look like they may go bye bye. That frees up $95,040 a day. What would be a better use of this money?

Even by their non-use, they are "used" to support the price better - compared to having a lot of dumping pressure.

[smooth]

Whales will become totally irrelevant when the user base and posting volume increases by 10x or 100x or even 1000x. There just aren't that many whales and whales have the same voting power restrictions as anyone else. A rare whale sighting will be a big deal.

You presume all whales are benevolent. Stake will eventually end up in a power-law distribution, because perpetual 100% debasement is not sustainable (even the transactions fees of the entire earth could not support it).

Also it is incorrect to say they play by the same rules. 3 x 3 = 9 is not 1/2 of 6 x 6 = 36.

Any way, I have proposed a partial solution.

By voting power I was referring to the declining weight according to frequency of votes placed. Just like anyone else, whales can only make about 40 votes per day without depleting their voting power. So with millions of posts and comments and a handful of whales making at most 40 votes per day each, do the math.

[magicalacademy]

http://thestringpuller.com/2016/07/a-steeming-bubble/

[iamnotback]

Whales will become totally irrelevant when the user base and posting volume increases by 10x or 100x or even 1000x. There just aren't that many whales and whales have the same voting power restrictions as anyone else. A rare whale sighting will be a big deal.

You presume all whales are benevolent. Stake will eventually end up in a power-law distribution, because perpetual 100% debasement is not sustainable (even the transactions fees of the entire earth could not support it).

Also it is incorrect to say they play by the same rules. 3 x 3 = 9 is not 1/2 of 6 x 6 = 36.

Any way, I have proposed a partial solution.

By voting power I was referring to the declining weight according to frequency of votes placed. Just like anyone else, whales can only make about 40 votes per day without depleting their voting power. So with millions of posts and comments and a handful of whales making at most 40 votes per day each, do the math.

But those 40 (times many whales) are enough to influence (with quadratic weighting) the Top 100+ ranked posts on the site which earn perhaps 90% of the rewards.

I have an idea to add the recent blogging rewards as a significant component of voting power. Those who are generating good content should have more weight even if their stake hasn't accumulated yet. It would be more dynamic. We can't assume whales are benevolent any way, so we need to have game theory that won't allow whales to increase their percentage of stake via voting.