Topic: Someone please make a steem clone - page 8. (Read 14356 times)

You are still attributing motive! Again, #fail.

I sincerely believe that you are falling into the groupthink of "whales control everything" that is widely spouted on that site. It's quite wrong. As I have explained many times, there is no quadratic weighting between users. Two semi-whales are equal to a whale. Ten deciwhales (call them dolphins) are also equal to a whale. Ten decidolphins are equal to a dolphin.

This is happening all the time on the site and the fastest growing group (not counting the bottom rung which is very likely padded by many scammers vacuuming up free 3 SP accounts hoping to be able to cash them out some day) are the middle rungs, the dolphins and semi-dolphins who are constantly growing in influence as they earn rewards. Whales are limited in number and increasingly limited by both attention and voting power dilution in being able to vote at all for an increasing ocean of content. And whales are also mostly powering down, further reducing their influence over time.

Yes whales will pile on to some content when it reaches Trending. But how does it get there? Whales can't find it. Even with a team I miss a lot (I know this because the team members give me few duplicates). The power is already spread out and being spread out more and more daily.

Compared to anything else that exists today, there is probably more opportunity for the masses than any other method of monetizing their work. Typical opportunities for (non-star) writers and artists to make money are minimal to nonexistent. Until and unless there is something better, Steem is quite wonderful, even for the masses and not just the superstars. No, they won't all make money, and most that do won't make much, but more will.

Steem is reaching into a huge untapped market of theoretically-monetizable talent that has been completely untapped because existing vehicles for monetizing it have been so atrocious. I don't know how deep that is, but the bottom is nowhere in sight.

I think nonprofessionals generally make literally zero from their writing and creative work almost always, and even many lower-level professionals struggle mightily to make more than $1.32. So, no I don't think $1.32 is good pay for an hour, but I also don't think social media is ever going to be a job for most, it will be a fun and potentially (occasionally) rewarding way to pass the time.

That may happen. It is indeed a huge competitive advantage relative to the fully-centralized platforms. As yet this is entirely speculative so we don't know how significant it will be. There does seem to be the start of a thriving effort in independent development for Steem with some very nice results. (I really like steemstats.com and use it daily for example.) We'll see if that continues to grow or dies out once Steem is less new and has viable competitors.

As for the much better model, go ahead and create it if you think it is really much better (since much better can overcome a first mover; merely better usually can not).

If Steem fails because something much better beats it in the market despite the uphill battle of being much later, it will mean we have a much better platform, and I'll be happy with that outcome.

I meant implied intent, not necessary to be conscious intent. You are actively trying to promote diverse content (kudos to you!), believing this will help attact a wider diversity of usership. So you are trying to do the role that organic diversity would do, but can't do because whales have all the control.

I argue that inorganic curation will be a false positive for the users, and they will realize there isn't the readership they are misled into thinking there is by the large payouts for diverse content. Once again, this is the white paper's design to fool users into incorrectly assessing their earning power on Steem.

If you think anyone's time hour(s) are worth $1.32

Edit#2: smooth I expect your rebuttal should be along the lines of arguing that open source can add more new features faster than Medium or Facebook and thus will out innovate in terms of fun. And that for now it is only necessary to seed the database and usership in order to seed the ecosystem of open source clients other than Steemit (which could operate on different types of media and formats).

On that point I will concede it has a chance. But I still think there is much better model. And I better shut up and code, so please let's wrap our discussion.

What insight/information can you add to help me not waste my time?

You can't attribute motive like that. I did upvote it but not for that reason.

However, I would comment as a counterpoint to your claim that Steem does, almost by definition, have a significant economic following, as long as it is able to pay competitive rewards to authors. Most authors and artists make so little no matter what they do that it doesn't even take much to be significant here.

The meal definitely cost more than what we have made from is post hhaha good job we have kept our day jobs and just blog about it for fun.

@smooth, @smooth.witness, @complexring, @itsascam, @steemed, @kushed, and @roadscape are whales who upvoted this and are responsible for nearly all of its reward thus far.

Thus we have the whales trying to create the impression that Steem has an audience and significant economic following for a serious writer.

Being popular within a groupthink won't do anything for the bottom line profits or readership of a serious blogger who is not targeting the demographics of that groupthink.

See the example I linked to where the blogger has 119k followers already else where, and doesn't want to risk the disruptive effect given Steem's demographics are not tuned to his and besides Steem only has maybe 5000 - 10,000 ongoing users at this stage. Steem would need millions of diverse users before it could even begin to offer 119k followers to him:

PHASE SIX
Giving back - no I'm not a Whale, I don't hold much value. But before I leave a community I've been a part of for the last 3 years I'd really love to make a positive difference & impact. There are over 5000 members in the New Zealand Playcentre Association and over 400 centres. If you're unsure what Playcentre is we are a not for profit charity that provides quality early childhood learning - COMPLETELY run by the parents, VOLUNTARILY.

PHASE SEVEN
HOW - How on earth am I going to convince 5000 people to join steemit so that we can all upvote each Centres fundraising plans (Can you imagine 5000 upvotes)?. This is my goal. I know I'm going to need some back up and a really good speech to take forward in the hopes of changing the way we fundraize forever. No more applying for grants and getting turned down. No more pushing sh*t uphill.

How can you be sure of that? Futures contracts reduce degrees-of-freedom. I guess you mean given what you know now, you don't expect to be leaving Steem.

May I ask what is the motivation for you to promote to Steem so significantly (you have twice already given exclusivity to Steem)? Is it predominantly ideological or is it your male reader demographic is well represented in this cryptonerd space? I doubt it is the blogging rewards, as I presume you're rich already from your fame.

The ideological motivation would appeal to me the most.

Tangentially, I was nearly the same kid as you describe wearing polyester clothes, often being a recluse in my hobbies at home, and often selected near to last for sporting. The difference was I was getting a bloody nose every day at 5 years old playing tackle football and I loved it. And when they selected me near to last, they sometimes paid the price in defeat or at least some shock. So I was the nerdy looking smaller kid, who was deceptively athletic. And by age 13 or so, I had already filled out and I was not a virgin after age 15. And by high school, I had already become very social. And my hobbies were not just reading (although I did read the Hardy Boy series, I didn't have access to many other books) and I was also very into engineering and hacker activities. In retrospect when I decided one day in elementary without any outside influence that I would stop wearing underwear, I realized I was a rebel and I loved it.

Good point. Apparently another impact of the rewards system, that authors are incentivized to write for maximum audience superficial upvotes instead of maximum relevance to their core following. I also tried to keep my blog posts short, because I know that is essential to attaining widest readership.

One could point out that terse content (the age of snapchat and swipes) is more popular. But I presume bloggers don't always make their most money by targeting the most superficial readers. I presume they target a lucrative demographic and sometimes a target demographic is attuned to in depth time consuming content. We will be become a society on only tweets and no more books?


Also I want to say that in spite of this flaw, Steem is going to generate a lot of hype and grow from here. The issues I am pointing out are medium-term problems. In near-term, I think it is likely more and more users will see the $$$ and give it a try. We are essentially onboarding everyone who had some affinity to cryptocurrency. Until that viral spread has peaked, we should see more upside to Steem's signups.

I don't like what many authors (I'm an author too so my criticism is on that level) are doing with the breaking in very small parts. Sure it's more readable, but 1400$ for 588 words? Huh? So if I have a 2000 word story, it would be better to milk it as 4 stories for 1400x4 ?

This is very inconsiderate to the reader I feel. It is disruptive to immersion and difficult to "follow" an author on when they'll publish part2-3-4. Plus by the time they do publish it, you've forgotten the plot and are out of the "feel". Stories, in particular, require a certain level of immersion in order to activate the readers imagination centers, where he start to get the "feel" of the story. 500 words aren't enough to do that, and 4x doses of 500 words won't cut it. You can't properly immerse and get the feel of the story.

I am just sharing. I am laying out much of my thought process for peer review. It is not an attempt to dominate the discussion, rather it is an attempt to be open.


For example, the title was clickbait for the male who wants to know some secret about the why females are in the bar, i.e. expecting some hypergamy or PUA insight:

https://steemit.com/life/@sweetsssj/the-secrets-of-why-girls-go-to-the-bar

But it is only a blog post relevant to those (smaller coterie) who might want to visit China or know what bars are like in affluent China. But he was forced to make the title groupthink clickbait in order to get the upvotes he received.

If he had titled it, "Bar overlooking skyline in China" I bet he would have only earned a few hundred dollars at most, and perhaps a total flop.

I believe the site will turn more and more to game theory manipulation instead of relevance. Which is precisely my point. The quadratic weighing honeypot is too enticing to ignore and write for your followers instead. You don't bring your followers to Steem (unless they are cryptonerds), you extract from the demographics that Steem is drawing in due to hype.

The China content is also interesting to many cryptonerds and anarchists in spite of the misleading title, because we are all sort of idolizing China and Asia as the next big thing. Many nerds are probably dreaming of working and living in China.

Afaics, the diversity of the content is orthogonal to the cognition that to earn significantly, you must cater to the demographics that are already on Steem. Meaning it is possible to find diverse topics that are judged to have a high value by Steem's current demographics... But coteries are a negative economically on Steem because of quadratic weighting (except for now the cyptonerd and future of steem intersection coterie which is why two of my blogs paid well, and of course the boob coterie of young enough cryptonerd males to still get an erection). You actively want to avoid forming a coterie.

You call it parasitic, I call it rent. You pay orders of magnitude more rent for being on the busiest street downtown as compared to out on a country road in the middle of nowhere. But in most cases it is worth it because that's where the customers are. I don't think the value of being on a widely popular platform can be denied, but ultimately it comes down to price. Probably some specialists will not like the platform and its rent and will go elsewhere or self-host, just as happens with bloggers now. The numbers on how this will work out are entirely unclear.

Some serious superstar bloggers (e.g. @dollarvigilante) will seriously dedicate to Steem now, especially if their demographics fit to Steem's thus being winners in the quadratic weighting algorithm. But I currently believe the vast majority of serious bloggers will not see the incentive to switch to Steem. If serious and diverse bloggers are disincentivized to move to Steem, this is likely an Achilles Heel of Steem as currently immutably structured.

And Facebook is adding in-app content (blogs, etc).

As I said on a Steem comment reply, I don't think n^2 is written in stone either. It could be changed if the price is unworkable. It won't be changed to linear because that would indeed break the system, but there are a lot of other options.

This is a complex question and I might mess up the analysis, because frankly I am not even confident I know what the current algorithm is. I've seen mentions of curation rewards being a function of both total author reward (which is afaik a function of the square of the total votes) and of that the earliness of your vote matters in some non-linear way (note for curation rewards and afaics not for author reward). That seems to indicate that a whale who votes for his own content will earn the author reward of at least the square of his/her vote power, regardless of how early or late the whale votes.

But the overriding factor seems to be that the debasement of STEEM POWER is apparently less than 4% yearly (and note I'll probably be making a blog post soon on the precise math), so there isn't much incentive for anyone to vote for themselves because offseting that debasement by voting your share to yourself for whales is not worth the cost of failure to the system it could cause. And for dolphins, the 4% is nominally so low that it is a pita to vote for anything other than your conscience.

So it seems even a linear weighting might be safe, except there is the consideration of the power of compounding in that whales who can automate to offset say 4% compounding advantage versus whales who vote their conscience, will over time become the controllers of the system (all other factors being equal, which might not be the case).

We also have to consider that upvoting drives other voting by raising ranking and thus viewership. Thus whales can influence which content gets the most rewards, thus upvoting their own content seems to make the most sense if that content is of otherwise equal potential to receive upvotes as any other content. Thus the game theory seems to be a power vacuum that will suck in the controller who can organize stake to vote for successful bloggers (to obfuscate this from other whales who might downvote the phenomenon) which pays back some % of the author rewards to the organized voting stake (power).

From one perspective the quadratic weighting seems to make this game theory more profitable because the one who captures even a slight advantage in this power vacuum can take exponentially more of the author rewards. However, the quadratic ranking also means that the dolphins can't benefit from organizing themselves to vote for their own posts collectively, because they would be at a quadratic disadvantage compared to the whale controller.

Thus I conclude that the quadratic weighting is necessary to squelch dolphins organizing to game the system, but it hands the control (and eventually the entire system) to the deviant whale who realizes this is a winner-take-all paradigm. We end up with a system of serious bloggers who work for the master whale and the rest are subservient minnows and dolphins who are beholden to the groupthink control over economics of the system.

That is why I have redesigned this concept so there can be linear weighting which the dolphins can't profit on by organizing themselves (as I add a cost to voting but not taken from the user's wallet, yeah that will really make you think!) and which whales can't game either because I squelch whale voting power (everyone becomes a dolphin in terms of voting power); and note this depends on very strong Sybil attack resistance on account identities and that whales won't trust other people to hold their money for them.

Additionally in my design for a Steem-like system, I have also added another reward vector which greatly reduces the incentive and ability to take control of the system by gaming the voting reward algorithm.

Edit: to clarify that with linear weighting, the dolphins would be incentivized to band together in order to upvote each others' posts in order to get amplification of rewards due to raising the attention their posts get. Of course if users band together then they lose the relative amplification effect, but that is the point that the game theory incentivizes them to band together until there are too many banded and then the site's voting is one (or several) groupthink(s).