upvote, downvote, delegation, undelegation

For a long time I fought against bidbots and over that time, I lost a fair bit of support and I probably also gained some too. I was okay with that. Back some time over a year ago, I delegated to @ocdb which is run by @acidyo and is part of the @ocd curation project. It is a not for profit bot that serves a whitelist of manually curated authors only. "Not for profit" means the bot doesn't take a cut, the delegators of course do. Some might think I am an asshole for delegating to a bot, how much Steem have you bought in the last year?

Originally I started with 15k in there but as I kept on buying Steem, I decided I would put it in there to earn something instead of trading it on the markets and kept increasing it by selling other holdings for Steem until I got to 33K in there. This returns me about 10-14 steem a day depending on the day and the queue and the price and blah, blah. @ocdb has grown to have 4.2 million SP over the time as it not only returns for delegators, it gives a pretty steady 10% for buyers and most of the buyers do not abuse it and those that have, have been removed from the whitelist.

A whitelist is more effective than a blacklist as one has to "prove themselves" and get pro-actively noticed by an @ocd manual curator before making it on. Blacklists are a retro-active action and by then, the abuse has already happened. Encourage good behavior, not encourage the risk of bad and with anon accounts, a blacklisted author just comes back the next day.

However, my days delegating to @ocdb are likely numbered if the EIP of HF21 goes through because while I want to spend more time curating, I also want to spend time flagging without it costing me a Steem and a leg. The incentive has been so low to Flag on Steem because, there have never been enough people downvoting.

Content should be getting what it is relatively worth on Steem and while some bidbotted posts likely do deserve a higher payout, most do not. If a large manual curator chooses to support content occasionally, that makes some sense and that "good luck" big vote or support for consistent quality or value should be encouraged.

If the free downvote mana comes in I urge people to use it wisely, but not sparingly. Go visit trending and give a discerning eye to what you see there and decide if it deserves what it is getting. Remember that regardless of the purchase price paid between private parties and businesses, the payout comes from the public pool, a pool you have a stake in.

The proposal offers a 25% stake-based amount of mana that can be burned each day, that is 2.5 full votes every 24 hours. At least to begin with, use them all. ALL. The reason is simple. This is a community city and the trash needs to be swept from the streets.

Authors worried about not getting enough under the new proposed model - start downvoting the shit so authors can be seen and, put that 25% back into the pool for distribution. Then, use your other 10x votes to upvote content you consider valuable, interesting, worthy. If you do just this, votes will be worth 25% more.

But as said, my days of delegation to @ocdb might be numbered because not only could there be 25% more in the pool from flagging (very optimistic), there would also be 50/50 split of curation between author and voter. That closes the gap significantly for me to warrant pulling the delegation and more actively participating.

Mostly, I want to reward good content - and unreward shit content. Currently I can only do one or the other and one will get me a little return, the other will likely get me flagged in revenge. That changes after the EIP though so, what that means is instead of my current 7000 (I have 7000 delegated out to other people and projects as well) and max vote of about 16 cents (1.60 a day) and instead be voting with 1.11 (11.10 a day) + 2.5x1.11 downvoates (2.77 a day back in the pool).

That means that my actual vote value is 25% more than 10x vote. I effectively have 12.5 votes a day. Kinda. 10 I can allocate to content I deem worthy, 2.5 I can remove from content I don't. What is worthy and not, that is up to me, but I am not a dick. At least I think I am not a dick - some of those current trending authors with no fucking comments on their posts, plagiarists and consistent shitposters might think otherwise.

Once they get flagged into a negative return a few times, they will think twice about boosting their posts so high. That reduces buyers for the bidbots, reduces profits and creates a "use at your own risk" business model with a high probability that some ass like me is going to make that risk a near certainty. Will the community follow suit until there is a balance in reward and content? I can't say but under the EIP, the community comes much more into play in the management of the blockchain, something that has been missing for a long time.

Once it starts to balance, culture starts to change and while the flurry of negative curation might be hard at first, in time an equilibrium can be reached where there is both space for good content to get well rewarded mostly organically and, space for "lesser" content to still get some rewards. A Ferrari sells for more than a Lada, but a Lada can still sell.

It isn't the polarization of quality or nothing, there is space for degrees of content but it shouldn't be that shit is overvalued consistently while quality is smothered. The sorting mechanism is upvoting preferences and downvoting nonsense and it is also a deterrent to vote-buying on shite.

While I know that a lot of negative curation sounds somewhat scary to some people and counter intuitive to providing rewards, it has been done before by predominantly @smooth and @abit back in early 2017. They were counteracting whale votes only though and this time it would be the entire community with the power to counteract what the community considers unworthy of reward or height of reward. I am quite confident that some bought votes will actually be upvoted higher as the post will be worthy enough, I am also confident that some will be punished for the gall of adding hundreds to a blurry photo of crap. Overall though, there will be more in the pool to somewhat counteract the effects of the SPS and the 50/50 for authors.

I don't know exactly what is going to happen, but I know there is going to be an adjustment period of some length and a reestablishing of norms. I think that the current norms however are not sustainable long-term as I have predicted for 2 years now and, now we are seeing that the community is waking up too. How much are they going to awaken is yet to be seen but, with a different model that encourages more participation, at least we will see who actually wants to create a healthier Steem, and who are just leeching.

Btw, a delegation was removed last night (thank you @pharesim for keeping it on me as long as you have) so I will let my voting mana recharge a bit as it takes a hit when delegations are removed. I will keep rewarding comments as I can but I am likely only going to remove the delegation from @ocdb if the HF goes through. But then, I might change my mind on that too.

People might disagree with what needs to be done, but few disagree that something has to be done. Let's run some trials and accept there might be some more errors.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]

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