Should The Global Content Reward Pool Be Done Away With?
There has been discussion about it recently.
The problem according to @therealwolf
@therealwolf's argument was that the only valid argument for retaining the global content reward pool has been that it brings users onto Hive. But that user retention has failed as the chain only has some thousands of daily active users, which is why the chain should stop paying users for content that mostly wouldn't be valued on any platform.
Hive is also a social network of stakeholders of all sizes
The content reward pool has served another purpose which the opinion piece that I'm referring to did not mention: vastly improving stake distribution. Proof-of-Brain refers to exchanging creative work for cryptocurrency instead of computing power as in PoW mining. But Hive is also a social networking site where stake is earned by forming social networks. Those networks were a major reason why Steem was capable of fighting Justin Sun to a standstill. That battle put Steem and Hive back on the map and brought Hive a lot of goodwill and an excellent start.
If the global content reward pool were taken away, it would be interesting to see if Hive would really become attractive to millions of content creators and other users and fulfill the dream. If nothing else changed but the content reward pool wasn't there, I strongly suspect "the masses" would not come banging on our door. Would the token value automatically go up if Hive became just another DPoS chain where staking rewards and witness rewards were the only rewards? I'm sure it would be noted by the crypto press. I wonder if the publicity were positive, though, if Hive admitted its original value proposition was a failure.
Scarcity alone does not a valuable coin make
Would lower inflation make the coin moon by making it scarcer? Scarcity is not enough. Have you heard of a coin named Unobtanium? I guess not. It's a coin which is the hardest to mine on the market. Bitcoin's rate of inflation is halves every four years and is currently 2 percent per year but that's not fundamentally what gives it value. It's the fact that Bitcoin is decentralized and that it has no governance structure which makes altering its monetary policy extremely unlikely. For the same reason, it is very unlikely that any powerful centralized entity can meddle with Bitcoin or destroy it. HIVE being merely scarce would not give it any value.
Inflation by itself does not destroy value. It just necessitates doing something to keep on top of things. There are options for passive income on Hive even without replacing content rewards with staking rewards. A stakeholder can lease their Hive Power at a rate between 10% and 14% APR.
The aggregate value of all content created is lost because of poor content discovery
It shouldn't be forgotten that in exchange for one-time crypto rewards, authors create text content that lasts forever thanks to the immutability of the chain. The problem is that the visibility of old content on Hive front ends is very low. This creates the illusion that the content has a very low value while the aggregate value of the content is most likely much higher than usually given credit for. It just has to be made readily available to the consumer.
If the global reward pool were removed and it were not replaced with a consensus layer token (a Smart Media Token) - listed on any exchange, there would be no valuable tokens to be earned by creating content. I've got to know a few people here and I'd probably continue talking to them on Discord or Twitter but I'd cut down on my time spent on posting. I suspect most other people here would do the same. I would definitely continue my photography hobby but monetizing it would have to be done elsewhere. Based on feedback on other platforms, I believe it would be possible at least to a modest extent.
Inflation by itself does not destroy value.
No, but it does destroy value of the currency.
Inflation by itself does not destroy value.
No, but it does destroy the value of the currency being used to represent a value.(HIVE)
The market cap is what counts, IMO.
er, ok.
It's interesting to think of content creation as a Fetter on Hive's development for sure.
I just don't feel we're quite 'there yet' with being able to offer anything other than blogging as a working selling-point.
This proposal is maybe one for a few years down the line?
It wouldn't surprise me if it happens though, as it would mean more Hive being sucked upwards and less for the bottoms and middle.
Yeah, until you remember that old content has value, too, but that it is very hard for anyone to access.
Well, there is Splinterlands and other games.
The total inflation is decreasing by half a percentage point per year.
Yes. I think that's the only reason Wolfie proposed this.
I think what we need is a more effective way to access good content.
Fair point on the accessibility - but we do have side chains with their own front ends now, which still publish to Hive.
I'm not in favour of getting rid of pure Hive blogging, I think it's a real pull.
I was taking account of Splinterlands, it's thousands, not tens of thousands, then what's next? I don't think there are any other games that have brought more than 1000 users to Hive? No where near that.
They suffer from the exact same problem: poor accessibility of old content.
It would be premature.
That is unfortunately true. But I think with gradually improving every aspect of the user experience we can achieve results eventually.
Well now TSU is monetizing content and not even crypto...They will send to your Paypal. Sign up is a minute at most. All mobile app. Looks nice too...
Interesting. Is that platform funded through ads?
Yeah although I dont see many yet.
https://www.tsusocial.com/
It seems that you have to download the phone app to even see the posts.
Yeah I think that is right although you can see some basic info about the company on PC. TBH it looks good on phone. It seems more like Instagram than FB or Hive.
Isn't the unique feature which distinguishes HIVE from other blockchains/crypto currencies the social aspect (where it's main advantage compared to conventional platforms like facebook is that authors are getting paid for their work; plus censorship resistance)?
In my opinion user retention only doesn't work because (manual) curation doesn't work!
I had written about that here and here, and just recently got involved in an interesting discussion with @blocktrades.
In short: the manual curator who upvotes later than all the auto voters is disadvantaged on HIVE because of several reasons, for example the short curation window. It's more beneficial to upvote popular authors again and again instead to seek for new authors or also check the posts of long term but less popular users to encourage them to improve.
If we removed the global rewards pool what would then still be the incentive for the average blogger to join HIVE?
Yes. It is its very identity.
There are many other impediments, including the difficulty of creating an account and the overall complexity of the platform.
Thanks for the links. I'll check them out.
That's actually a misunderstanding. When you upvote popular authors, you're going to have to share your curation rewards with a larger number of other curators. In fact, this is why @acidyo had @reward.app created. He said too many large curators eschew voting on those posts that already have many votes on them because it means lower curation rewards, which is a problem according to him because it means many of the best authors are left without the large rewards that they deserve.
Also, remember some of the most powerful curators on the platform, @appreciator, @rocky1, and @upmewhale are engaged in active manual curation just for that purpose: user retention.
Censorship resistance, although the average blogger will never need it. Only those who write about topics that are controversial enough to deter advertisers.
I think that should be solvable.
That's the essence of my ideas to make early, blind auto-voting less beneficial:
Convergent linear curve for author rewards (as we have it now, with the advantages to discourage self-voting and make high author rewards for quality posts possible).
Curation rewards should depend only on the own vote weight (HP, percentage of the vote). That would mean the date of the upvote and the number and strength of the upvotes of other curators wouldn't matter for the own curation rewards, and thus someone who upvotes late and manual (after reading) wasn't disadvantaged compared to someone who just spreads his auto-upvotes. (I don't believe in the myth of the manual curator who finds unknwon 'quality posts' early - and then is followed by the crowd - that may happen sometimes but not often.)
Possible addition: lets go back to 75 % author and 25 % curation rewards, as self-voting would be somewhat more profitable because of a higher curation (but at least no author) rewards (due to #2.).
That leads to the fact that the most popular authors are upvoted very early without anybody reads what they write (right, some 'curators' read anytime later what they have upvoted earlier)! For example a blocktrades post may have about 40 dollars pending rewards after less than five minutes.
What you describe, to avoid upvoting posts with already quite some pending reward doesn't apply for the huge majority of auto-voting users, but for some desperate manual curators who are frustrated to only upvote posts where some automats have been faster again.
I sometimes do the same when I see that the well known 'maximizers' have been there. If such a post is great, I often ask the author to write a comment for me to upvote, so that I can support only him, instead of the 'curators' (who don't deserve that name, because real curation means manual work: seeking, reading, evaluating).
I am admin of an insect community, and some of the posts seem to be updated randomnly by these accounts above. As I am an expert in this area, I can say for sure, that most of the time they don't pick the best, most informative posts of the highest quality. I have no idea what their criteria are.
Yes, I really appreciate this 'feature', and some others do as well, but I think getting rewarded for posting is the biggest incentive for the majority of authors.
I fully agree.
"Convergent linear curve for author rewards (as we have it now, with the advantages to discourage self-voting and make high author rewards for quality posts possible).
I agree it does not happen often enough. Therefore, the curation window should be back to 30 minutes. I don't understand why it was shortened to 5 minutes.
I think the 50/50 split is good because stakeholders must have an incentive to earn by curating. Otherwise there will be a greater number of placeholder posts self-upvoted for the rewards - and vote selling. It was pretty awful to look at on Steem. I think the EIP is a pretty solid whole.
The early upvote penalty will reduce the effectiveness of that quite a bit.
Most of the auto-voters do not understand the system. They've never looked at the curation rewards they're getting in detail. Those who are a bit more smart about their auto-curation are able to a higher APR helping them to grow faster. It's much more profitable to look for a number of second-tier authors and optimize your vote time and size for them.
That's actually an interesting approach!
I think the problem with only a few accounts doing that much curation is that the curators get tired and sloppy. I would say that my own posts show a clear correlation between post quality and votes from any of the three above accounts. The correlation isn't perfect but it is statistically significant.
I fully agree. I rarely write the kind of stuff that would get censored anywhere. Quora allows answerers of questions to censor comments and it's highly irritating when some asshole does that just because you are able to prove their bullshit wrong. That does not fly on Hive, which is really nice. But if it weren't for the rewards, I would be on Quora because the range of content is so much wider and there's always someone with whom to discuss whatever interests you. I'm really hoping the user base will grow enough during the next crypto bull market that I can experience the same here, which I did to an extent during the previous one.
I am against any curation window. Why should anybody who optimizes the date of his vote earn more than I do when I upvote late?
@blocktrades answered, that without a curation window even more upvotes would accumulate on posts of popular users, but I think if curation (not author) rewards only depended on my own vote weight, there was no reason for me anymore to upvote popular users - then I could simply upvote whatever I like. :)
I think their main incentive should be a higher HIVE value! I am also a stakeholder and see it like that.
In my opinion already with the first bid bots the downfall of STEEM began, because there were no benefit anymore in creating quality posts.
With the convergent linear rewards curve that's not so lucrative anymore (as author). And if curation rewards depended on the vote weight only (and counted only 25 %) they could as well decide to upvote quality posts ... Flaggs would serve to combat the remaining abuse.
And those who are really smart recognize that all that maximizing doesn't make much sense as long as the HIVE price doesn't increae (most of the maximizers own many HIVE anyway, so a high HIVE price would serve them even more than others).
That's a good point. Then the window would be one week long.
But I'm sure curation rewards should depend only on the vote mass used for voting. But I would not dismiss the idea, either.
What do you mean? That in 50/50 stakeholders get too much? That less would be sufficient?
Well, of course. With the 75/25 split, it was too lucrative to sell votes, self-upvote or circle jerk. With 50/50 there is less pressure to engage in those behaviors because it is easier to earn on honest curation, ceteris paribus.
If your stake is large enough, you can self-upvote despite the convergent linear curve without suffering from the curve tax.
This is a coordination problem as in the common good and the good of the individual stakeholder being misaligned. It's not a question of smarts. I'm really positively surprised at how effective the EIP has been at helping align the incentives. Bid bots got wiped out in less than a week.
What I might be interested in trying is making the convergent linear curve non-linear all the way. That way, the very best posts could earn better. Also, at the high end of the reward spectrum, posts would be much more sensitive to downvotes, which would help fight abuse.
I think that currently curating is far less work than creating content, especially as the big majority of curators don't work for getting curation rewards but simply let programs do the upvote job.
So in my opinion 25 % for 'curators' is still a lot (it's still free money for not working). :)
But what I meant is that as a stakeholder I would like to be rewarded for holding my stake by a price increase of the HIVE token! If that happened, I wouldn't depend on earning huge amounts of curation rewards anyway.
I see no reason why a self-vote should have been more lucrative? Now you get less author rewards but more curations rewards for self-voting ...
It's similar when circle-voting (even if then other upvoter come into play, so that's not exactly the same).
But most important is that there are 'free' flags now, so that the self-vote problem shouldn't as serious as before anymore.
Yes, maybe if you belong to the ten biggest HIVE stakeholders ...
They should flag each other then, if one of them exaggerates. :)
(But again, more curation rewards doesn't mean that self-voting is less lucrative as the self-voter gets author AND curation rewards anyway).
Yes, I absolutely agree that some things have significantly improved.
That also means for me that among the three 'concurrents' HIVE, STEEM and Blurt for me HIVE is still most promising. :)
I am happy with convergent linear - so at least there is one thing I am happy with, haha. ;-)
Sure, but they've got stake. Stake is valuable. If they don't get sufficient yield, they can leave.
Most importantly, you only get voting power by staking your coins a.k.a. powering them up. Powering down takes 13 weeks. There has got to be an substantial reward for agreeing to do that. If curation rewards are made too small, no one has any incentive to power up.
The balance has shifted towards voting on others being less of a direct loss. Only self-voting has always come with loss of reputation and subsequently financial losses, which is why very few people only self-vote.
Downvotes are severely underused and probably always will be. So counting on downvoting only for a solution to work is not sustainable, in my estimation.
It does on balance because very few of us are short-sighted enough to act in the most selfish manner possible without regard for the negative social (and financial) consequences of that.
By the way, I'd like to know how I can access the Blurt command line wallet. I don't trust the condenser and I don't want to insert any of my keys there. But I don't want to change my keys on Hive, either.
Why should they? I also don't leave BTC even without any 'yield' (at least not in the sense of getting interest). I would accept zero author and curation rewards in case that the HIVE price would rise to - for example - 10 dollars. :)
So if the big stakeholders actively contribute to a higher HIVE price they may benefit more than if they only work on their personal curation maximization.
My curation rewards are completely alright for me, even if the maximizers would just smile about my naivity. I see no reason why it must be more? I would tell them to either believe in HIVE and its value or to go elsewhere.
I am no Blurt expert at all, but in case you still don't have it, that's their Discord (you could message and ask their 'leaders' there).
Why would you power up, then? Someone who holds liquid HIVE is no stakeholder. A stakeholder has staked their coins. Why should anyone power up? Well, because it is absolutely essential for chain security.
It's a coordination problem.
They're freeloaders and a system that tolerates freeloading is not sustainable. That's why you have to rein in freeloading under any system. On Hive, the EIP accomplished that to a good degree while being far from perfect a solution, of course.
I'm going to have to drop by that Discord channel then.
Why not? With some HP you have influence on witness voting, on the selection of proposals, you can support quality content and of course you do earn curation rewards (we are just discussing about how much).
(By the way, as far as I know "stake" can have several meanings, so I don't share your strict definition that the one who only owns liquid HIVE wasn't a stakeholder.)
I didn't know so far that in English "coordination" was a synonym for "greed", but alright, it's not my mother tongue. :-)
You lose the ability to sell a pump. If you own a lot of HIVE you could lose out on a lot. This is why there are about 200 million liquid HIVE while the vesting fund is only 170 HP.
None of those things can directly benefit the stakeholder financially. To ignore that is to operate under unrealistic premises, on which nothing can be built.
Staking coins has an established meaning in cryptocurrency. It involves locking coins up in a built-in smart contract with delayed unstaking that gives influence over governance under PoS or DPoS in exchange for staking rewards. This is of utmost importance for chain security.
I'm talking about misalignment of the common good and private interest. The matter is no joke. For example, the legal system is nothing but an attempt and aligning the common good and the individual interest by giving the individual strong enough disincentives to act too strongly against the common good for his/her own gain.
That's exactly the problem, that everybody wants to benefit "directly".
Of course stakeholders benefit in the long term if they for example support quality content and thus increase the value of the platform; a network full of quality content attracts new users who start posting, suggest their friends to join, too ... trigger an avalanche ... (cue network effect).
Of course stakeholders benefit if reasonable proposals are supported so that for example great apps can be created.
And again: where did I say there shouldn't be curation rewards anymore?
I don't intend to argue about definitons here.
That's human nature: the one constant in any system ever built that involves humans. There will always be individuals who act selfishly.
What you do is you design systems that acknowledge human nature and align all incentives as much as possible. A broken system is one that relies on idealism.
So long as those goals stand in the way of short-term maximization the system will not work as intended and may even fail completely. This is why you try and disincentivise those short-term strategies that are harmful as much as you can when you design the system parameters.
No, you suggested that going back to 25/75 might be a good idea.
Think about the following fact:
Roughly when BTC had it's all time high of about 20000 dollars, STEEM had a value of about 7 dollars (I didn't check the exact dates and values now).
NOW BTC has a value of about 11000 dollars, while the price of HIVE/STEEM amounts roughly to 20 dollars, ehm I mean 20 cents. :-)
And during all these years between these two dates greed and aspiration for short term profit reigned the platform. To satisfy the short term greed of many stakeholders (by bid botting, vote selling or granting them high curation rewards) didn't lead to success! So what exactly is broken?
Wouldn't it now be the time to exceptionally try a long term strategy? ... And if then that would have failed, too, you could come back to me with your theory about "broken" systems. :) But for now I claim the system based on short term greed has failed!
(Just a sidenote: The price of any cryptocurrency is a relatively inaccurate measure of the success or quality of blockchain project it is a native token of. There are hundreds of coins that have very little actual use that still sport high market caps. A good example of that is Dogecoin, which was a joke to begin with.)
Incentives prior to the EIP were broken. The EIP fixed the problems to a great extent, but far from completely, when it comes to curation. It was a combination of three elements: the non-linear convergent reward curve, the free downvote pool and the 50/50 split. Those three work in combination. I think going back to the old 75/25 split would make things worse.
It wasn't the purpose of the old system to satisfy anybody's greed and let them exploit the system. The creators of the system, by which I mean the rules coded into the blockchain, did not anticipate the extent to which stakeholders were capable of exploiting them. There was a design error resulting from a lack of experience with systems this. The problems were mitigated to a large extent by the EIP but not completely.
Greed and short-term thinking are apply to people. Systems are a separate thing. The old system on Steem wasn't "based" on greed or short-term thinking. It just didn't take those human qualities adequately into account. Its creators didn't anticipate the full consequences of those aspects of human nature. The EIP did a better job.
I am convinced that the STEEM/HIVE price would be higher if the platform was thriving by gaining and retaining new users who would just enjoy being here and recommend the platform to their friends and relatives ...
Hey, I am not a newbie, no need for explanation of the EIP. I observed, commented and discussed the whole process these days.
What I suggested above is also a combination of three elements:
Convergent linear curve for author rewards (as we have it now, with the advantages to discourage self-voting and make high author rewards for quality posts possible).
Curation rewards should depend only on the own vote weight (HP, percentage of the vote). That would mean the date of the upvote and the number and strength of the upvotes of other curators wouldn't matter for the own curation rewards, and thus someone who upvotes late and manual (after reading) wasn't disadvantaged compared to someone who just spreads his auto-upvotes. (I don't believe in the myth of the manual curator who finds unknwon 'quality posts' early - and then is followed by the crowd - that may happen sometimes but not often.)
Possible addition: lets go back to 75 % author and 25 % curation rewards, as self-voting would be somewhat more profitable because of a higher curation (but at least no author) rewards (due to #2.).
As I already wrote, I see no reason to reward 'curators' with more than 25 % for doing nothing else than letting a program upvote popular authors as fast as possible!
I think every single point which I am suggesting is worth to be discussed thoroughly.
Actually, most of my ideas don't contradict the aims of the EIP. Only the return to "75/25" would ... but that would help against self-voting as soon as curation rewards only depended on the vote weight.
Just? That was (and is) exactly the problem!
Concerning the EIP I think it had an overall positive effect but I am by far not as enthusiastic concerning its impacts as you are (and I expressed and explained that in the posts I linked at the beginning of our discussion).
It's very possible that there would be more speculative buzz if that were the case. Demand for HIVE arising from such organic (non-speculative) demand is extremely far from affecting the price significantly, however. I once did back of the envelope calculation based on revenues per monthly active (MAU) user of mainstream platforms that HIVE (then STEEM) would be worth about 1 cent (if Hive were as good as Twitter at monetizing MAUs, if as bad as Reddit, orders of magnitude less) if all the speculative hot air were taken away.
That's one side of it. Another one is that curation rewards are the one thing what makes powering up worthwhile. Without a high yield, powering up is just shooting yourself in the foot because you lose the ability to sell your coins in case the price spikes, which it is known to do at times. Even if you're a passive investor who just leases their Hive Power, your customers are much more likely to pay well for the delegation if they can expect their curation rewards to be better. If the curation rewards are cut in half, then there will be more vote selling, circle jerking and self-upvoting. Downvotes are so severely underutilized that I
I disagree: the value of a (social) network is measured among others by the number of its users.
What do you think where the value of facebook comes from - superior technology maybe? :)
No, we had that already. There is no reason why self-voting should be less lucrative when receiving more curation rewards for the self-votes.
Bid bots/vote sellers can and would be controlled by flags.
Also the @haejin case is a good example which shows that coordinated flagging has a strong impact (especially since there are 'free' flags).
This is crypto. The valuation of the HIVE token is between 99.9% and 95% speculative according to my quick calculators based on the number of monthly active users and potential earnings per monthly active user. Twitter is able to generate about $9 of earnings per monthly active user PER YEAR. Out of the mainstream platforms, Twitter is the best at generating ad revenue per monthly active user. Facebook makes about $7 per monthly active user per year. Assuming Hive was as good as Twitter at monetizing its user base, the token price would be about 1 cent.
Even if the monthly active user base of about 40,000 of Hive grew a hundredfold, even that wouldn't guarantee the current price absent speculation.
Of course, it is because there is a certain amount of social pressure and risk of getting flagged against self-voting. The 50/50 split caused the balance shift towards less self-voting.
None of those factors alone did it. Many small-time vote farmers saw their gains cut substantially by the non-linear convergent curve.
So if HIVE price rises you will all say HIVE is so great, and the EIP does the job, but if it keeps falling that's because of speculation. :)
The amount of "social pressure" didn't change with the change of the curation reward percentage.
As you may have noticed, I am in favour of that curve.
Actually, it's convergent linear (not "non-linear convergent").
Absolutely not. That's what you seem to be doing.
Look, that pressure is a force against vote farming including self-voting, and the potential rewards are a force for vote farming. By weakening the latter, you shift the balance. I won't repeat this again as I'm hoping that I have finally managed to make the point successfully.
Yes. Just saying that the three factors together did it.
This is starting to go in circles somewhat. :)
I would like to thank you for taking trouble of engaging in this exchange!
Where did I do that? I am observing the STEEM/HIVE price since years, for example compared to the price of BTC, that's completely different than considering short term speculations for my evaluations.
As I explained, 50 % curation rewards don't reduce the rewards for self-voting (it leads to less author but more curation rewards for the self-voter), and also not of vote farming with own alt accounts. It also doesn't changes the amount of social pressure on self-voters.
But of course you are free to disagree and keep your different opinion.
Yes, right, we simply don't agree in some points.
I may write a post about my ideas concerning curation, so that more people are involved and can think about them.
Thanks for the tough discussion. :)
There are many reasons for why centralized platforms have millions of users while Hive only has a few thousands. Centralized platforms are endorsed and have backing by many companies who use them to sell their products, there are deals, funding and so much more. They have the influencers whom they pay huge amounts to keep them there and their following. Centralized platforms are easy to use for everyone and users look at their favorite creators in awe and hope to become them one day. Look at Twitch and Youtube making deals with the big creators. Even fing Dlive tried to have an exclusivity deal with PewDiePie hoping that it would kick start their platform. How did that go? He went back to Youtube because they paid him more and also he probably thought well this sucks, no one even watches me here anymore.
When people talk about removing the reward pool as an answer to the problem why Hive price has not reached the Moon yet, it just makes no sense to me. There are other issues far more important to solve before you can say that having a reward pool is useless and to say that the content creators we have here now are not even deserving to get rewarded is insulting. We have wonderful creators here who have embraced all the difficulties one has to go through understanding the crypto world even a little bit. They are people who have been realizing the potential of crypto and they should be rewarded for it. Many creators have also become investors over time.
If we want to take crypto to the masses, we have to make tools and apps that are easy to use and to understand for the masses and if we want to compete with centralized platforms, we have to think of creating something that’s not been done so far instead of inventing new Youtube, Tik Tok, Twitch, Steam etc. Centralized platforms are already competing today with each other, smaller platforms get squashed by bigger ones all the time too. It is not even only about Hive either. It is crypto in general. As long as people don’t understand it and what opportunities it offers, Hive or bitcoin, or any other chain or coin will not Moon. We are in business to make crypto popular, but to do that we have to build things that allow people to begin understanding it and embracing it in their lives.
Removing the reward pool would solve nothing.
I fully agree with that. Removing the content reward pool would kill the platform.
By the way, I think it's time to review our witness votes.
I am removing my witness support of anyone affiliated with therealwolf