Steem pyramid scheme revealed

[AlexGR]

2kool4skewel/Decentralizeeconomics's greatest fear takes shape:

LOOOOOOL... so that's what steem dollars look like

[iamnotback]

I believe jl777 is reacting to my criticisms I've been sharing with him about Steem:

Once a new category is established, it would be nice if there was a category fund that can act as a virtual whale for that category. I can think of automated ways where if enough high reputation accounts are upvoting a post in a specific category, the virtual whale upvotes. This automation would put the power in the hands of the dolphins and relieve the whales from having to work 24/7. Also by the whales being less active, their stake is gradually diluted, which helps distribution.

You are apparently not thinking about the game theory of how this can encourage Sybil attacking it for gains. There is a reason the whales are given control with a quadratic weighting, and it is because otherwise all sorts of ways to game the voting system are enabled.

It isn't going to be so easy to fix Steem's voting and ranking algorithms, because it is a fundamental problem.

James and I getting deeper into it:

Please comment on what is proposed, not what you assume is proposed.

I commented on what was proposed in the blog post. I didn't read your comments after you made the blog post.

So let us assume there are N such specialist curators. Now a majority of these curators need to upvote a post with a #trading tag for it to trigger the autowhale upvote.

This seems to be different than what you proposed in the blog post. When you wrote “reputation” in the blog post, it presumably means the reputation system recently implemented which is that number in parenthesis next to our username which is tabulated from vote history not elections.

Okay so now you morphed (or clarified) your proposal to elections of delegates who will control (some portion of) the whales' voting in the instances the majority of them (a quorum) agree.

There are some issues with this:

1. Election of such delegates is political (introduces politically correct speech enforcement, censorship, one-size-fits-all groupthink).
2. If the number of tags (quorums) exceeds the number of whales, hypothetically one could argue this increases the degrees-of-freedom in the rankings, but his also presumes that #1 isn't prevalent, e.g. whales don't effectively influence or control the election process.
3. The individual preferences of curators is bound to the barrier of the majority quorum, so it still isn't a high degree-of-freedom ranking algorithm, i.e. that synergy between spontaneous groupings of like-minded groups will be muted. It seems you are headed towards the politics of Reddit rather than some fundamental breakthough in relevance matching more akin to Googles PageRank and subsequent algorithmic improvements to relevant search.

Radically improving relevance will be a major breakthrough. I don't think your proposal will be that significant of an improvement because it lacks algorithmic power to develop emergent phenomena in relevance and like-mindedness, although it might spread rewards around a little bit better (unless #1 is entirely gamed as it is always is in politics due to the Iron of Political Economics and the power-law distribution of wealth).

[r0ach]

(sorry I couldn't resist to play with the "bimbo" after all she is a playboy bunny)

I will see your bimbo call and raise you a bimbo*2.

[AlexGR]

Well at least nobody can say that steemit isn't pushing crypto to mainstream adoption. "Bimbos" and playmates are now using cryptocurrency....

[iamnotback]

Well at least nobody can say that steemit isn't pushing crypto to mainstream adoption. "Bimbos" and playmates are now using cryptocurrency....

I am very excited about Steem conceptually because it validates the concepts for marketing I was thinking about for Jambox. (That is not to say I am convinced that Steem's exact design can cross the chasm to millions of users)

Steem innovates how to distribute the tokens into the hands of the masses, i.e. the onboarding problem.

I was also thinking the social networking participants had to earn the tokens somehow and I was trying to think of ways they could (one of the ideas I had which was mining, failed in the final analysis).

I didn't think of collectivizing the control over the debasement, because I am generally against collectivism and because of every design I thought of for that was unsound. And it turns out to be a technically valid criticism because afaics Steem can't get out of the whale controlled quadratic weighting quagmire for as long as the debasement control is collectivized without encountering game theory failures on the incentives to not vote for oneself. And one of the key aspects I want to change about Steem is that the debasement will be under individualized control (without raising the cognitive load that causes microtransaction tipping to not work) while still of course collectivized in economic effect. This will enable my design to fix what I think is an insoluble game theory problem in Steem. But no one should take these words as fact. Until everything is peer reviewed in a white paper, then just assume I may have mistakes in my thought process.

What happened is that the split between STEEM and STEEM POWER caused me to have epiphany. That is where the crux of the innovation of Steem lies in my opinion. But I think they could structure it differently with better attributes.

[Spoetnik]

@Shelby
You are full of shit again !

You bitch & moan about China for example Controlling Bitcoin.
Rail on about centralization & control issues then drop to your knees blowing this scam ?

It was already pointed out how the top few guys control this rigged ICO scam.

It's sad pathetic & pittiful you would come out in support of this scammy garbage in the face of mounting evidence.

No wonder all you assholes cycle through accounts here like crazy then disappear later.

[TrueAnon]

I cannot believe peoples are falling for STEEM.it price WOW.
BS

[AlexGR]

It's because it's the only altcoin that you can obtain without spending anything besides your time (blogging/commenting).

Besides, it's better than spamming the bitcointalk.org forum with ad-sig campaigns and dropping one-liners all over the forum to get the post count up for the payment.

[AlexGR]

Playmate part #2: https://steemit.com/steemit/@brendazambrano/my-facebook-post-as-promised

I don't know if the invitation vector (hey go there, they are giving money for intros / 10$ per signup) is good though...

[smooth]

Well at least nobody can say that steemit isn't pushing crypto to mainstream adoption. "Bimbos" and playmates are now using cryptocurrency....

I am very excited about Steem conceptually because it validates the concepts for marketing I was thinking about for Jambox. (That is not to say I am convinced that Steem's exact design can cross the chasm to millions of users)

Agree.

When I first saw Steem (pre-announcement during the mining phase when I had to reverse engineer what they were doing from the source code), I thought of your posts and our discussions about the merging of social media and crypto. I don't know if those posts had any influence on the Steem developers or if this is just a case of what r0ach calls convergent evolution. Either way you are directly responsible in part for my early interest in Steem and I consider you to be one of the conceptual godfathers of the approach even if someone else went ahead and developed it first.

[DecentralizeEconomics]

Has anyone notified Mark Lyford about this new revolution in smut 2.0 technology?  He's gonna be mighty upset if the Larimers didn't invite him to Steem like they did to Bitsnares.

[generalizethis]

Has anyone notified Mark Lyford about this new revolution in smut 2.0 technology?  He's gonna be mighty upset if the Larimers didn't invite him to Steem like they did to Bitsnares.

Maybe the internet will call demanding a piece of the action too, "Move into my corner and paying girls straight up for their content--that ain't right! There's rules to this game, hustler--first you start a site, gather up your girls, and then force them to pay to play--that's how it's done, none of this zero marginal cost Bull Shit!"

[generalizethis]

...subtle, but malicious not

Has anyone notified Mark Lyford about this new revolution in smut 2.0 technology?  He's gonna be mighty upset if the Larimers didn't invite him to Steem like they did to Bitsnares.

Maybe the internet will call demanding a piece of the action too, "Move into my corner and paying girls straight up for their content--that ain't right! There's rules to this game, hustler--first you start a site, gather up your girls, and then force them to pay to play--that's how it's done, none of this zero marginal cost Bull Shit!"

Oh, I'm pretty sure the Larimers and their associates are getting their cut.

https://steemit.com/poetry/@generalizethis/carvaggio-s-last-plea

[iamnotback]

Another example where smooth and are not always like-minded on voting and this is another example that we need to fix the voting algorithm to group like-mindedness (i.e. I should have not seen this blog post so highly ranked as it was irrelevant for me ... although while the voting rewards and ranking algorithm is what it is, then this is relevant for me and causes discord):

I downvoted this “shit” because the playmate was doing what she does best, and which is a fact of our society and the way the mating game works. You are just parasiting on her coattails and adding value only for those who are jealous and/or incapable of accepting facts of life and mating game theory.

I am not arguing that the playmate should have received $16,000 for her blog post, but that is not her fault. It is the fault of the voting rewards and ranking algorithm design of Steem. Note that while the algorithm is what is, then this blog posts appears to me and is relevant in the sense that I need to post to argue that your post is irrelevant to me in an more correctly designed ranking system. But for now, it is relevant (and thus not shit), because the algorithm causes discord and I need to post my objection.

[Thenoticer]

Another example where smooth and are not always like-minded on voting and this is another example that we need to fix the voting algorithm to group like-mindedness (i.e. I should have not seen this blog post so highly ranked as it was irrelevant for me):

I downvoted this shit because the playmate was doing what she does best, and which is a fact of our society and the way the mating game works. You are just parasiting on her coattails and adding value only for those who are jealous and/or incapable of accepting facts of life and mating game theory.

I am not arguing that the playmate should have received $16,000 for her blog post, but that is not her fault. It is the fault of the voting rewards algorithm design of Steem.

Tipping the playmate or any poster who is showing skin, is not much different then being in a strip club and tipping a stripper. As is now, if steemit system is letting this stuff get on page one, then steemit is in effect encouraging it. Which make steemit a virtual stripclub, or playboy.

Anyone remember this line, "I only read it for the articles"

[iamnotback]

Which make steemit a virtual stripclub...

See the edit of my prior post.

If the rewards and ranking algorithm was not quadratic then no one would be getting $16,000 unless they have 1000s of votes. And thus not everyone would be seeing that playmate blog at the top of the rankings. Thus the perception of Steemit as any one content focus would not be occurring.

Edit: but without the quadratic voting rewards, it is arguable that Steem would lose some (most?) of the hype and promotion. This is one of the reasons why I incorporated another reward into my design.

[iamnotback]

Afaics, Steem has no designed solution yet for plagiarism:

When you find a plagiarist, it's good to leave the link (or other evidence) in the comments so that everybody else can see it before they upvote.

As I noted three days ago, your suggestion isn't that effective:

Here a key weakness of Steem's voting and relevance algorithm:

https://youtu.be/rkQ7b-u8_6g?t=698

And unfortunately Dan's expectation is not what is always happening as exemplified in my case.

I think this problem can only be improved when account identities can't be Sybil attacked (i.e. are verified identities and the same person isn't allowed to create multiple disposable identities) and then when rankings and rewards more accurately reflect readership demand to squelch those accounts with bad reputations. To that end, I am currently contemplating that the rankings and reputation system needs to more resemble a WoT (Web of Trust).

[AlexGR]

Afaics, Steem has no designed solution yet for plagiarism:

The solution is curation.

The question is: Can curation scale?

In the stand-alone form, I think not.

It'll take:

-automation (some bots automating some processes)
-delegation (like what smooth does with hired curators - or other forms of partnerships between whales and smaller accounts that help curate)
-decentralization (more dolphins and whales to handle increased content)

[iamnotback]

Afaics, Steem has no designed solution yet for plagiarism:

The solution is curation.

The question is: Can curation scale?

Probably not against Whac-A-Mole.

[iamnotback]

when I had to reverse engineer what they were doing from the source code

The white paper wasn't available? If you figured out the white paper from the source code, I am impressed.