Why n^1.3,? That seems like an arbitrary magic number. Why not n^2? The only thing I know is Steem isn't working. It seems entirely broken now while in the past it seemed inefficient but not entirely broken. It used to be that once in a while I would discover really interesting content but this happens less and less often.

> If the only metric considered is economic, then only economic undertakings are considerable in analyzing success. I have attained much success at engagement and gaining insight through the criticisms of better minds of my thoughts, and this is far more valuable to me than some dollars, or Steem.

Money is the language of markets. This is not going to change. The only way we have which is universal to quantify demand is how much people are willing to pay for something. We need this feedback loop.

The fact is, in the regular world rent and tax are priced in money. So you will not be able to pay your electric bill to blog or mine crypto if it didn't generate enough money for your business operation to be sustainable (not even profitable).

> For social media and UX like Steemit to actually succeed at changing the world, other metrics that are more important than mere money must be considered. It is the focus on stake and stake-weighting, a legacy of indoctrination imposed by banksters whose hoarding of wealth produces much of the misery of the real world, that has engendered many of the extant problems regarding Steemit rewards.

Outdated ideology is in your post. There is no such thing as "hoarding wealth". To read that would imply wealth is zero sum and the pie is fixed. I do not see this in the latest economic text books or anywhere so where do you get the idea that wealth isn't being created? Here is how it's created...

The people who have, who were here before you, who are your elders or seniors, or mentors, are the people who you must provide services to. People have wants and needs and by supplying these they will reward you. This is the most basic element of how a service economy works. No one has everything and most people have something to offer.

What this means is that each new person who joins the network brings more wealth to the network based on what they have to offer to the network. The whales cannot hoard wealth unless they don't want anything from anyone else on the network in which case the network has a low utility to the whales. Provide higher utility and the wealth will grow regardless of whales.

The fact is there will never be perfect equality. It's not natural. Some by way of luck are born with more than others. Some work their way up from almost nothing. The people who work their way up in Steem for the most part had to create wealth in the process of doing it. They had to provide some value to some of the people to get upvoted. If you're talking about whales who were grandfathered in from pre-Steem launch then you would have a point there.

The founders do have quite a bit more Steem than everyone else and things could be better but the point is wealth should grow not simply be redistributed. Growing the pie is better than re-arranging deck chairs on the titanic.

Other metrics than money which matter:

- Followers 
- Total upvotes received
- Ratios (posts to followers or posts to upvote)

It's not just the money which determines for the blogger the growth of their content producing. It's other metrics too but the point is money is what allows for sustainable content production. It's what makes everything else possible.

Aaaarghl ! I can't believe this ! Yet again I find myself fully aligned with @valued-customer ! :-D

Yes ! That is the key ! The "utility maximization" - utilitariansim of @dana-edwards and before him, [Jeremy Bentham](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Bentham), is mostly right, to about 80%

But it's not enough, as [John Stuart Mill](https://www.economist.com/schools-brief/2018/08/04/against-the-tyranny-of-the-majority) has realized over the course of his philosophical journey

>Mill did not reject utilitarianism as thoroughly as his contemporary Thomas Carlyle, who argued that only pigs would view the seeking of pleasure as the foundation of all ethics. Instead, Mill qualified it. Unlike Bentham, who thought that pushpin, a board game, was “of equal value with...poetry”, he maintained that some sorts of pleasure were superior to others. He denied that these nuances meant he was no longer a utilitarian at all. What may at first seem a purely virtuous act that engenders no immediate pleasure—being true to your word, say—may eventually come to seem essential to well-being.

We need an overlay of about 20% social values on top of the "utility maximisation", as a guiding light. 

Utility maximization and "social rewards" that cannot be quantified, such as "The ability to post things that aren't popular (censorship resistance)" are not contradictory, quite the opposite, they can complement and strengthen one another, with enough thought.

It's not going to be simple, but it's largely worth it! We are building a whole new world here

@BERNIESANDERS AND @UBG ARE CHILD SEX PREDATORS! @Pfunk is very closely involved in the child sex ring! @UBG was caught posting naked pictures of children on Steemit chat when he was drunk. He also registered @Child and @Children accounts and claims to "love children." Then he posts comments on blogs of mothers breast feeding their babies. All while he wears his Bugs bunny costume and masturbates. This child porn posting incident was before he ripped off Steemit Inc for about 180,000 Steem by registering over 3,000 accounts .. then he sold the account names to Steemit Inc! He has them hidden in many accounts such as @Warren.Buffett. Yes, Ned has been knowingly doing business with crypto thieves and pedophiles like @Fyrstikken, @UBG and @BernieSanders! Did you know Fyrstikken stole every penny of crypto that is currently under his control through a few organized robberies against groups like @Adsactly? What a mess Steemit is. Most of the top 19 witnesses belong in prison for tax fraud!

Here you can see @UBG showing his butt to the whole internet, mainly he wants children to see him naked.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@ubg/stickers-anyone-everyone

Here is his real name and parents address in case you would like to inform them of their son's theft and child predatory behavior.

Tanel Sillaots
Meistri 15
76506 Saue
Estonia

The goal isn't to punish, it is to shift incentives system-wide (not even particularly for the individual being downvoted, though they are obviously included in the system-wide incentive). It is possible with stronger downvotes that you still don't get much downvoting, because people understand they need to avoid content agnostic and otherwise non-value-adding activities (they would attract downvotes and therefore waste vote power, so people don't do them).

Without downvoting there is always too much incentive for people to vote for for themselves or a conspirator based on individual value extraction.

In the case of Steem specifically, there is something else going on here because the pool is  by defintion short-term zero sum. When you downvote and shift rewards _away_ from something you don't believe deserves them, you are shifting those rewards _toward_ other earners who (at least by comparison) do deserve them. The encouraging of good behavior occurs _there_ when the rest of the users–the ones not being downvoted–are able to receive rewards.

We need to align the incentives better, there's no question about it. The greed will adapt. I'd love to curate more, but the system is built that way that I'm losing out on short term while doing so ( long term we're all fucked probably, doesn't take a genius to figure that out ). That's not the Steem I was promised, not at all.

So in your view things are perfectly fine the way they are? That's a fair point of view but clearly you disagree with the poster on this.

That works on a small scale and I applaud whoever is altrustic enough to be responsible for that, but it wont scale up to address system-wide issues.

Downvoting (if not crippled) already introduces the necessary non-linearity in my view. It functions as a form of consensus-finding much like superlinear, without the flaw that larger stakeholders (and/or larger groups of stakeholders) can collude to take more than their fair share. It does exactly what you say in terms of e.g. bidbots because bidbot posts that attract downvotes would lose a share of their rewards and NOT receive a linear payout.

It is much less subject to abuse (including by bidbot-like schemes, which could easily gain under superlinear) because you can only push rewards non-lienarly _away_ from non-consensus payouts, but can't push them _toward_ yourself (directly or indirectly). 

I feel downvoting is just a better solution to this exact problem, but if it is given a serious try and doesn't work then I'd be more open to reconsidering superlinear. Though, still, I'm skeptical it would just introduce/reintroduce more problems. Perhaps a bit more superlinearity at the low end (to prevent dust farming) that transitions to linear as the rewards become significant would be okay.

> I think for projects that truly require a linear token, that's the perfect place for SMTs.

I'd actually say the opposite. Superlinearity with stake weighting will always be perceived as unfair (and for good reason in my view). In the case of SMTs with uniform voting, superlinearity could be a better fit (though I still expect would be abused). Likewise SMTs might serve some subcommunity where the cultural context makes the lack of 'fairness' not a problem or even an advantage (pure speculation here).

>At the heart of what favors content indifferent voting in terms of profit maximization is that vote/sp is identical (roughly speaking) irrespective of where it's cast. 

We need to get out of the pure "dollar term reasoning", think outside the box, bring in a second dimension, a second yardstick, that is what makes us human and not cold calculating machines

We need to come together and create communities around shared values. A set of shared values inspire human behaviour even in the absence of economic incentives (see religion and ideologies). 

We need to start a series of thriving, vibrant steemit "passions" as there are already examples around "open source software" (@utopian-io) or "science" (@steemstem)

Mini societies that curate based not on the financial reward but on their own internal, subjective value system

>"Variation in reward for any given sp weighted vote is crucial to making it more difficult to mindlessly price votes for bid bots, favor good curation more, and generally helps content reflective voting behavior to out-compete content indifferent behavior."

This is absolutely true, but this only regards economic incentives.

I note that our interests aren't merely economic, and neglecting other metrics precludes competence at effecting other rewards that are more valuable than money.

I keep hammering on this point because I am confident that only by considering those more valuable aspects of society can we resolve economic imbalances caused by only considering economic factors.  Finance is integral to society, but it is not the only metric that matters.  Failing to use other metrics forces economic metrics to primacy, and thus profiteering is unavoidable, as when only economic metrics are considered, only financial profit matters.

I note that problems sought to be resolved involve non-economic factors, and those factors must be valued and rewarded to rationally address those issues.  Effecting non-financial rewards is necessary to achieve non-financial goals.  There are other valuable considerations, such as friendship, content quality, and societal felicity, that are necessarily exchanged in social interactions.  Proposing only economic functions as solutions precludes successfully aligning the economic aspect of social media with the actual value of society.

As I understand them, SMT won't fix Steem distribution. And because Steem will be needed to power (d)app, then Steem will remain valuable and the way they are distributed will still matter.

If it's implementable then I might support it over n^2 and I would definitely support it over the linear system that we currently have.

Right, but those with the most SP can (and some definitely will) use them mercilessly.. even just setting them to auto downvote certain people constantly, forever. I think the main reason we don't already see more downvote wars is because people know they are losing upvotes as a result. I understand there are valid reasons to empower downvoting more, but I can definitely see problems with it too. :/