I believe in observing the ecology to determine what's going on in it and what those who participate in it want and need.

Given that the vast bulk of the people operating on the blockchain are engaged in curation manipulation in order to acquire reward, then I think it's safe to say – judging by the rules that Steem, Inc. have laid forth, people really do need curational awards that much. They want them. They want to engage with them.

Just not personally. They have no interest in actually playing the curation minigame themselves. It's far more rewarding to build bots who engage in playing the curation minigame algorithmically.

You get what you reward.

I cannot imagine a number of sets of rules which will not advantage automation significantly, but all of them ultimately hinge on making a change in basic assumptions about what STEEM means in the blockchain.

At this point, the basic commodity itself exists purely as an authoritarian, top-down assessment of your value to either create or successfully bet on pseudo-viral content. Not content which is good or reportable to a community, but content which other people will judge to be sufficiently viral.

And that's really all it means. If people like myself who are creators but who don't particularly make things which are likely to be runaway popular get rewarded, that's a pleasant accident. It means that some people probably lost their bet on me and my work.

Worse, it means that if they did vote my stuff up with the intention of me being rewarded for providing them something that they liked – the mechanics of the game say that they're playing it wrong. That's not how to get maximum reward out of the system.

From my perspective, that's very sad.

Maybe I spend a lot more time thinking about how to create sets of rules that people want to play with, but it certainly not incomprehensible to me that a set of mechanics could be put together which incentivizes an individual engaging with the platform in ways that rewards them with things other than bigger numbers that they want. To do that, it takes an effort to understand what else they might want.

The current population of Steemit? Most of them just want bigger numbers. And that's all.

It's no great mystery.

It is quite sad.

This is why I have proposed eliminating curation rewards altogether.  I have also proposed delinking VP from SP, and instead weighting VP with reputation that is actual community vetting.

It isn't stake-weighting that draws people to Steemit, but rewards.  Stake-weighting was intended to incentivize investors to use SP to direct content development, but instead it has merely become a vector for financial manipulation.

Coupled with a mechanism that precludes bots, Steemit would be truly a social media platform - but investors would be offered only the incentive of capital gains by which to profit from their stake.

Those with the stake prefer the immediate returns gamification of rewards provide, and content be damned.

Incredibly informative and spot on. Glad to hear your thoughts on the bot issue as a bot creator. Thanks so much for this amazingly well thought out response.

<blockquote>
You know that if you restrict self votes hard enough, we will just have two accounts per user? one with the SP and one with the content.
</blockquote>
<p>
You could restrict them by implementing diminishing returns:
</p>
<p>
I think that ...
</p>
<ul>
<li>
... <a href="https://steemit.com/steemit/@jaki01/ideas-for-more-justice-on-steemit-ideen-fuer-mehr-gerechtigkeit-auf-steemit">diminishing returns</a> would make it less attractive to upvote oneself or certain other accounts again and again.
</li>
<li>
... the restriction to four full paid posts per day (like it still was some hard forks ago) was very reasonable.
</li>
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... a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function">sigmoid</a> reward curve would be interesting as it makes self-voting less attractive (it starts flat), but also prevents extreme rewards for single posts (as it ends flat as well).
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</ul>
<p>
Further suggestions very appreciated ...
</p>

> I just have to reply with: It is not that easy.

The problem is that it is exactly that easy. It just requires the will to do something that works for goals that are expressed.

If anyone of those three points is not attained, then something else gets done.

Something else is getting done. Which leaves the rest of us to wonder which of those three points has been ill expressed.

> The 30 minutes window was added to make it harder for bots.

And it failed. Spectacularly. Not just a little bit, not just kind of – it failed to the point where no there is an entire complex ecology of multiple interacting bot swarms, some of them enacting proxy wars between whales.

> With your solutions, there is no linear decay, so minute 0 votes are back again. You can solve that by ignoring the order of upvotes. And since all are treated equaly, the first day is not curating, but getting a piece of the pie, you will have $1000 trending posts that are a few hours old and where everyone wants to upvote them as they give good curation.

Since HF 20 seems to be all about the collection of dust from low SP accounts, it doesn't really matter if minute zero votes were to come back or not. In fact, you'll notice that I specified that under my plan, all votes – no matter where they went into the cycle – would be processed in exactly the same way. Which is effectively ignoring the order of the upvotes, yes.

The bandwagon effect already exists, it's just that to determine what the most likely bandwagon at any given time is requires a computer to calculate every decision at every point. Remove the advantage of the computer doing so and humans will do so more often.

Of course, to really fix that particular curation problem, the total payout for a given account will probably need to be put on a pseudo-logarithmic scale, which very well could reward minnows and plankton fairly aggressively at the beginning, and every one fairly little as they add on more. Specific calibration of that level would require some experimentation, but at least it would be grounded in the experience on the ground.

(Note that I have no solution for either Trending or Hot, because both of those trade on the assumption of more money from anyone and more upvotes from anyone are completely as equal as anything else, that is the top-down authoritarian view of value. One of the first things I did would be to rip both of those out and replace them with a system which at least makes a first effort at producing content which is specific to the things that you have voted up.

I'm not threatened by $1000 posts who got there in an hour. That's fine with me. I'm troubled by the fact that curation is largely wasted effort if you care about the content. The content has no impact on how well or how at all curation will proceed.

> You know that if you restrict self votes hard enough, we will just have two accounts per user? one with the SP and one with the content.

Oh I do, and I'm perfectly aware that such a choice would be to simply delay the introduction of that player into the community which feels they need to have two accounts, one with the SP, and one with the content. But since that doesn't actually change the way things are now in any meaningful way, I'm willing to take the wash in exchange for making such arrangements easier to find.

From the perspective of the new user, all you've done is to point out that they will have to buy a second account in order to compete with their basic competitors in the space – but that not for quite a while until they learn more about the mechanics of the system.

> No it is just a way to allow is to make creating accounts costly without having to pay a lot of steem. Means that steemit can create accounts for free without having to validate people on their uniqueness as hard as they are not giving out that much free money. And the dust threshold exactly disincentivises having a bot army, as there is now a flat cost with each vote. I think you have read that completely the wrong way. Check the link to the HF20 announcement, that explains how the mining is working and what it's goal is.

A discount create an account that I don't have to pay SP for is a lot more important than giving out free money. You have decided that by trashing the requirement that you do a basic check that someone is a unique entity, so everything is cool and ready to go. Except, of course, that you can then turn around and load that account up with SP (delegated but less) and your choice of bot engines – and you're ready to go.

The problem for their approaches to dust is that they're trying to have their cake and eat it too. You can't simultaneously argue that accounts walking around, only able to emit dust which will be an advantage for newcomers and that it will not simultaneously be an advantage for new bots. Both of them are equal in use to an account who can vote with dust. But the bot can do so more frequently, more efficiently, and with better coordination with others.

Advantage, bot.

> I don't see it. For me as someone who develops bots, these changes give me a hard time. They don't make things easier for me. Your suggestions would.

With a narrower field of time to deal with, the content only has to be up on the server for that minimum amount of time. Within it, bots will compete not to vote it up within the first 7 1/2 minutes, and will truly compete for the ability to file their particular vote sometime within eight minutes or so. Were it up to my design, I would have some random variation in bot design, just to see how much could drift before price stability reasserted itself. It won't be hard to figure out what the optimum bid weight is, and if I'm smart enough to pay attention to metadata about potential targets, I can get more specific yet

> Well let me say this: Steem is what we make of it. And we are humans, the ones who are having a lot of power are humans too. And I encourage you to make a post about changes you want to have, make it an utopian contribution if you want. Think a long time about all the ways users can abuse them and make them air tight.

Why does this keep falling on me? I have no interest in designing either a front end or a modification to the STEEM blockchain that would make it run better and more effectively.

I've learned a few useful things in my life, amongst which is went to look at a system and realize it is too far gone for the kind of changes that it will take to make it run well, or at least to run to the specifications set out in the documentation.

I will remind you that "stable system first," has but one outcome: "a system that no one uses." In on you system is perfectly stable, nothing comes along and disturbs its sweet interlude, no equilibrium is thrown free by accident or intent. If you are reaching for a stable system first, you will always find a system in which actually doing things is dis-incentivized – and such do we see.

I'm not sure what point any further conversation would have. At least not until someone bothers to actually address the weaknesses that I point out and give me a good reason why those aren't weaknesses that doesn't boil down to "no, that's part of the plan."

Because if they are all part of the plan – it's a shitty plan.

@reggaemuffin and @lextenebris  both valid arguments, how about looking at what other platforms do to negate the use of bots such as this. One example is by capping the number of votes you can make in a specific amount of time and then showing a message saying you have made too many - after that amount has been hit multiple times there needs to be a penalty or consequence in place, for other platforms it is a temporary ban on the platform however here on Steemit you have the unique *opportunity* to provide actual fines and penalties for bot like behaviour. If you penalised or fined the bot for doing the wrong thing then you burn the fine then everyone would be better off. *Just my 2steem worth.* I think you guys are doing a great job and I see so much potential in this platform. Keep it up!