Oh, No! Hard Fork 21 Will Kill Us All!

Believe it or not, I really don’t like writing posts about Steem. There are better things that I can be doing with my time and there’s better content that people could and should be reading and enjoying. However, there’s a lot of commentary about the latest hard fork proposal – particularly the Economic Improvement Proposal (EIP) – that just makes me increasingly more embarrassed to be associated with this community every time I read a new post or comment about it.

Many of the comments boil down to this:

“Oh, no! The EIP is going to kill Steem! We can’t allow 50/50 curation rewards or else authors will be getting NOTHING for all of their hard work!”

“Oh, no! The EIP is going to kill Steem! We can’t allow a non-linear rewards curve or else authors will be getting NOTHING for all of their hard work!”

“Oh, no! The EIP is going to kill Steem! We can’t allow a free downvote pool or else authors will be getting NOTHING for all of their hard work!”

If you notice how most of the arguments go, it seems that those people who create content on Steem will suddenly no longer want to create content at all. It would appear that these content creators only want to create content if they are assured a certain amount of rewards that they can cash out in order to “get paid” for their “hard work.” It’s as if these content creators believe that anyone creating “quality content” on Steem ought to be able to make a good living doing so.

What they don’t seem to realize is that this isn’t how social media works and that making any money at all for posting (mostly unseen) content on a single social media site is far outside the norm for “authors” on the internet.

What we have here on Steem is not typical in the world of digital social media content. An overwhelming majority of the posts that are awarded a piece of the inflation pie here on Steem would likely make $0.00 anywhere else. So when we talk about rewards and what a fair amount of the daily allocated inflation ought to be for a single post on a single blockchain/interface, we need to keep in mind that anything above $0.00 is actually more “fairly” rewarded than 99.99% of the daily content created anywhere else on the internet.

When people exclaim that – “Authors will leave because they won’t be making as much as they are today!” – where do they believe that these authors can/will go to earn more than the $0.00 they would otherwise get on most other websites that host user content? Where do they think they’ll make more than the $0.50 or $1.00 for a post that they currently complain about today, that very few people actually see, read, or care about?

Never mind the fact that their assumptions about what authors will be making after the hard fork are mostly based on existing behavior, which will obviously change post-hard fork. There’s so much complaining and attacking going on over just one of the protocols (50/50 rewards) in the EIP that everything else is pretty much glossed over. And many of the same people condemning the 50/50 protocol and anyone who supports it actually fully support the Steem Proposal System (SPS) that reduces the entire content rewards pie by 10%.

But let’s talk about something that all of these people apparently keep forgetting:

This platform has been on the decline both economically and socially for at least two years.

Many of the same people complaining about the protocol changes in the EIP have been complaining about the very things that the EIP is trying to address – namely, exploits that allow anti-social behavior and bot use to extract a considerable amount of rewards from the pool...which directly impacts the rewards allocation to the very authors crying “Foul!” about the EIP.

I have witnessed so much gnashing of teeth about a very small revision of the reward curve and the creation of a downvote pool by people who have been criticizing the lack of “policing” of spammers and plagiarists.

I have witnessed so much angst about changing the content rewards back to a 50/50 split between authors and curators by people who have been criticizing the lack of manual curation and investment.

I have witnessed many people seemingly screaming at brick walls about how users just need to altruistically act in the best interest of Steem, but as soon as protocols are proposed to actually economically entice people to act in that preferred way, they reject the entire premise that incentivizing such behavior will have an impact at all. Or worse – they apparently believe that these incentives will have the complete opposite effect.

At nearly every turn, these extremely vocal, moralizing, and often virtue-signaling users continue to rail against the very people that they must rely upon for their posts to be seen, read, and ranked against other content and for their rewards to have any meaningful monetary value: the investing/invested class of users and those who curate content with those investments.

They promote the piety of authors and their ability to make a living without a single penny of economic investment into the platform while denouncing the “greed” and “abuse” of those who assume the risk of not only mining and/or holding STEEM Power, but those who are purchasing or have purchased STEEM.

They adamantly oppose protocol changes that will actually mitigate some of the behavior and exploits that they acknowledge are a problem and vehemently defend existing protocols that opened the floodgates for the behavior they claim to not want.

They watch tokens/value continually flowing out of the system (often by these users themselves) and decry any attempts to incentivize behavior that keeps tokens/value in it.

They attempt to identify and praise who is looking out for the “best interests of the platform” and usually point to themselves as those individuals...individuals – the “little guys” – who want and need to “get paid” for their content creation in order to “make a living.”

How do they suppose this happens? How is their living made? How do they pay their bills? By purchasing STEEM or powering up their rewards?

Of course not. That’s not how you get paid and make a living in the real world.

The “little guy” here on Steem has had two years to prove that their increased influence on rewards allocation is beneficial to the overall system. For two years, the protocols have given them the opportunity to put their influence to the test. We have observed the behavior on the platform for two years and what have we seen?

Well, as nearly everyone has noticed by now, we saw the “little guy” – the non-invested or less-invested users on the platform – almost immediately turn to vote-buying schemes. At the first opportunity to exploit the new protocols, we saw some of these users rent delegation in order to operate bid bots. We saw many other “little guys” take the opportunity to buy votes from those bid bots.

We also saw these “little guys” turn to spamming and self-voting in order to exploit linear rewards. While most people were so thrilled to now be able to vote themselves a whopping $0.10 for a posting job well done, some of us were trying to clean up the exploitation mess (that we predicted and warned against) and were downvoting these exploiters...so that the other content creators could benefit from the rewards being returned to the pool...rewards that mostly went to the bid bots that they were using.

As we spiraled down the “self-promotion” and self-congratulatory abyss, the behaviors didn’t change. Very few people, if any, wanted to acknowledge that this new system was severely broken. It couldn’t possibly be that linearity was a huge problem and that curation incentives were massively outweighed by delegation and automation. It couldn’t possibly be that the very people assumed to be the “protectors” of Steem and its content creators were the ones taking advantage of the new protocols and the eagerness of all of those virtuous “little guys” who wanted to buy votes – or rent delegation in order to sell them.

No, it wasn’t the protocols or the new influence of the “little guys.” It was the people actually assuming the risk of powering up or staying powered up (and earning rewards in the form of SP) while authors and vote sellers were extracting value from the system.

Yes, it was also some of those large stakeholders who seized on the desires of the “little guy” to purchase their voting power. They could now assume less risk from being powered up to lease their SP and receive liquid payments in return. And those people who complained about how these “bad whales” are detrimental to the system continued funding them by purchasing votes from the “good little guys” now operating risk-free bid bots and by ignoring the protocols that are actually damaging the ecosystem and the perception of it.

So where are we now? What are all of these good people saying and doing to address the huge problems we have?

Oh, right. They’re railing against the EIP and advocating for the SPS...which addresses none of the actual problems. Not only does it address none of the actual problems, but the SPS simply gives the same people who allocate content rewards today (either directly or by proxy) influence over the allocation of rewards for “project development.”

And this is going to be done at the expense of content creators and curators alike.

These authors, “little guys,” and other condemners of the EIP want to keep in place the same economic protocols we have right now – the protocols that have resulted in continued abysmal user adoption and retention and continued value extraction via exploitation – and want to introduce a new scheme where more inflation tokens can be extracted from the system for “project development,” presumably by the same people who have been “developing projects” or the same type of “projects” that have added pretty much zero value to the system to date, based on the interest in Steem and STEEM prices.

But sure, let’s keep placating them and entertaining their author-centric ideas of what is “adding value.” Let’s just ignore the fact that most of them are here for one thing: to “get paid for blogging.” Let’s pretend that their interest in “getting paid” is morally superior to the interests of investors looking for a better return on their investment via higher-risk staking and making equally valuable contributions to the system.

Let’s continue with this absurd idea that new reward-extracting authors are simply more important and more necessary than risk-taking STEEM buyers and risk-taking stakeholders.

Let’s continue wrongly assuming that we just need more authors instead of better authors – and more viewers and content evaluators.

And of course, let’s continue assuming that anyone outside of the users of this platform actually care about its content and care that authors will be making a little less than they currently are with their overpaid, mostly unseen, and mostly uninteresting content.

Yes, all of you “little guys” that are just out there trying to “make Steem great again” are simply favoring the perpetuation of the same disconnect with the outside world that brought us to the point we are today. You’re advocating the same failed ideas and protocols that have made this platform virtually unusable for the average social media user.

But worst of all, you’re actually vilifying the very people who are trying to make things better FOR YOU as a content creator.

Anyone who has read my posts or commentary about Steem protocols and hard forks over my nearly three-year history on this platform will know that I was once one of the top curators on Steem. I was able to entice whales to follow my trail (without soliciting them) or delegate to me based on that curation...which was mostly targeted at “little guys.” Ask some of our users about ATS-David’s trail and how it helped them when they were starting out or when nobody else was supporting them. Ask them about my votes on their original and, in my opinion, high quality content and whether or not it helped jumpstart their blogging “career” here.

I have also been in favor of 50/50 rewards for two and a half years. I’ve spoken about it often, have advocated a hard fork to change it for a long time, and warned against the protocols that made curation less lucrative than automation and vote buying/selling. I even stated last year that, if the current protocols continued and if everyone continued to ignore the problems associated with the protocols that were changed in 2017, I could no longer spend my day seeking that quality content that I once gladly supported.

Many of the people I supported prior to that suddenly disappeared. They acted as if I simply didn’t exist any longer. All of those grateful “little guys” that would tell me how much they appreciated me and my support...well...they mostly appeared to turn their backs on me because I merely suggested that the incentives were piss-poor for the contributions made by curating stakeholders and that it wasn’t worth all of the effort I was putting in.

Once I made the decision to pretty much give up on my previous routine of curating, even more of these virtuous “little guys” distanced themselves from me. Every now and then, I would see (and still see today) these same people telling us how awful stakeholders are and how authors need more money – and that the current protocols aren’t the real problem.

If only people would be more altruistic! That’s the key to it all!

Or so they continue to claim.

Meanwhile, I continued advocating for changing some of the protocols that are proposed in HF21. We now have an opportunity to fix the lunacy that is and has been linearity. We have an opportunity to increase the incentives for human curators to manually curate content again. We even have an opportunity to allow users to downvote over-rewarded content without losing out on potential curating rewards – which isn’t even something I have been calling for, but will at least have some impact on the rewarding of low-quality content.

In my opinion, this hard fork is far from ideal. We can do more. We can do better. But these protocols aren’t bad. They simply aren’t what I consider ideal.

And for every person out there claiming that HF21 has too many changes at once: I agree. But this is something that has been argued for three years and apparently won’t change. Furthermore, these set of protocols are nothing compared to the package-deals that were forced down our throats in HF17 and HF19...hard forks that have negatively impacted the system.

The rationale for protocol changes such as linearity, delegation, daily vote targets, payout periods, and many other changes were inadequately or sometimes not even addressed at the time the changes were proposed. Some of the rationales that were given directly contradicted prior explanations of the system’s protocols. Many of the protocol changes weren’t even changes that the community was demanding – they were simply protocols pushed by Steemit, Inc. for the benefit of Steemit, Inc. and their friends.

Today, while so many users pretend to be up in arms about the EIP, seemingly none of them were or are up in arms about the many large and extremely consequential changes that occurred two years ago and that still hugely and negatively impact the platform. That’s perfectly fine. We must only make small and practically meaningless changes to the protocols now so that we avoid any negative impact on authors who want to collect what’s owed to them.

Right.

Instead of fixing what nearly everyone now admits is broken, we should just implement the SPS.

We shouldn’t touch the economic protocols. We should create a new extraction method where STEEM is allocated and flows out of the system.

We shouldn’t allow authors and curators to split content rewards evenly, thereby pushing more rewards into SP versus liquid STEEM. We should just reduce the percentage of the total pool of rewards going to them and make the new reward pool easier to dump.

This is what makes sense?

Two years of absolute shitty behavior incentivized by terrible protocols that should have never been adopted? And we shouldn’t address that first...or at all?

Two years of useless project funding via rewards allocation and delegation that has resulted in no discernible change in user adoption and retention on the Steem platform? And we need more of that and more funding of that?

I’m sorry, but if that’s what you believe we should be doing today – as the platform circles the drain in terms of social media, interest from viewers and investors, and value within the blockchain/cryptocurrency markets – then your continued input is practically worthless.

The economic protocols need to be fixed because they’re absolutely broken. Authors are already leaving or not joining. They didn’t join or they left when the rewards curve was superlinear and when the curation rewards were previously 50/50. They don’t join or they’re leaving while we currently have linearity and 75/25 rewards. The fear or the threats of authors leaving if those protocols are changed again is practically meaningless and inconsequential.

Authors will come and go as they always have. What we need to do is ensure that the system’s protocols are coherent and that the system is functioning as intended. Right now it is not.

The SPS does not address this.

The EIP does and attempts to at least partially fix it.

So, favoring the SPS and completely denouncing the EIP – if you truly are interested in changing behavior for the better – is absolutely counter-intuitive and counter-productive. You may disagree with the specific protocols, but to disagree with doing anything at all in order to correct prior colossal mistakes is insanity.

So where do I stand as a long-time user, a Steem witness, and as both a content creator and curator?

My stance is this: Fix what is currently incoherent and broken.

If that’s not the priority, and you’d rather just plow ahead with new gimmicks while the old gimmicks continue cannibalizing the system, then I have to question what your motivation is as a Steem user. Since many of us with more substantial stake in the system continue to be maligned by users with much less stake – due to some backwards mentality about rewards extraction and motives – perhaps we need to actually question those who seem to be perfectly content with the shitshow that is content production, discovery, and ranking on Steem.

I have done everything I can to share my thoughts about Steem protocols over the years and how we can all benefit from improved incentives. I have offered plenty of rationale for making changes or for keeping protocols. I have offered plenty of solutions to fix previous and current problems – solutions that have nothing to do with the size of my post rewards or the size of my wallet.

Yet what do we continue to see? People complaining about the potential impact on the size of their post rewards, as if those rewards are the only thing that matters for this blockchain and its adoption.

So, for the record, I’m going to tell you exactly what I think about this proposal. You can cry and denigrate me all you want, but I’m interested in the overall health of the ecosystem. What are you interested in?

My official position on HF21 as it stands today

You can refer to this in any future posts about this subject. Many of our consensus witnesses may not feel like addressing these changes, but here I am again, doing what they don’t/won’t do. Feel free to support me, if for nothing else, actually engaging and offering a clear stance on protocols and my vision for this platform.

1 – The SPS

I am against this protocol at this time. I don’t think it will have much of an impact at all around here except to waste more of our inflated tokens. It’s certainly not something that’s a priority. There are much bigger problems to address.

If, for some reason, the community insists that we need it, then the funding should come from a combination of SP “interest” (which should be eliminated entirely) and consensus witness rewards. Taking the funding from the overall content rewards isn’t ideal.

2 – Convergent non-linear rewards curve

I am in favor of this simply for the fact that it’s better than linearity. My preference would be something like n(log n) or an algorithm with similar impact on rewards.

3 – 50/50 rewards

I am absolutely in favor of this and I think this will have one of the most meaningful impacts on behavior. I actually believe that 50/50 does not go far enough in terms of incentivizing risk-taking for those who power up STEEM. I would like to see it closer to 60/40 or 65/35 in favor of curators.

4 – Free downvote pool

I’m indifferent to this, but I feel that it could have some meaningful impact if users can overcome the stigmatism of downvoting content. The toxic culture that has been built around disparaging those who use downvotes for reward disagreement is pretty much disgusting and entirely antithetical to the system design.

My overall position on HF21, if the SPS is included, would be to reject it. Take out the SPS, propose the EIP as its own set of protocols first, evaluate the impact it has on the ecosystem, then decide if the SPS is even something that’s necessary.

Prioritizing is something that has been downright dreadful around here for quite some time. Fix what needs to be fixed first – what was broken by previous hard forks – then we can discuss the extra bells and whistles. If you don’t believe the system is broken and in need of an economic fix, then I can only assume that your brain is what’s broken instead.

And to anyone who wants to whine about my "tone" - I will just treat you as the irrelevant whiner that you are, so don't expect any meaningful response from me.

Thanks for reading!

Feel free to tell me what you really think. I’m so excited to hear the opinions from all of our amazing authors and “little guys” who have been making Steem an attractive content platform for content consumers to visit.

---

VOTE FOR ME FOR STEEM WITNESS!