Steem(it) needs to motivate bloggers to develop and bring in diverse communities of like-minded followers, which have the voting power to financially reward the blogger even without a whale’s vote.
Such engagement can lead to viral growth, because there would be a broader base of sub-groupings of interests served. Yet we must not enable the game theory vulnerabilities that were discussed in the following three blogs recently:
- https://steemit.com/steemit/@chitty/whale-s-dilemma#@dantheman/re-chitty-whale-s-dilemma-20160812t155654929z
- https://steemit.com/steem/@anonymint/blog-rewards-can-t-be-widely-distributed
- https://steemit.com/steem/@dantheman/people-rank-using-page-rank-algorithm-for-better-curation-and-rewards
Solving this problem has perplexed everyone, including (originally myself and) the great minds of the creators of Steem.
Proposal For Fixing Steemit
I have contemplated a much simpler algorithm which seems to me to be more robust than those already proposed. That is we could weight voting power not only by STEEM POWER, but also multiplied by the ratio of uniqueness of followers relative to the system totals. In other words, if you have 10 followers that are not following anyone else, then you would have the same followers weight as someone with 100 followers who are also the followers of 10 other users. The community would need to contemplate for voting power what the relative weight between followers weight and STEEM POWER should be, i.e. the relative importance to assign to uniqueness (diversity) of community building.
Of course this algorithm could only apply to users and followers who are verified, otherwise it could be Sybil attacked. Verification could be a community effort, wherein a threshold reward in the #verification tag designates the verified. The community would police this #verification section.
Expected Benefit
What I expect this improvement to do algorithmically is spread out voting power more to those who have more readers’ attention than STEEM POWER. It motivates bloggers to not just go after the groupthink created around the gaming of the whales’ votes, but also gives them another motivation to create a following to drive more financial reward (since for example the system by default already has the blogger automatically upvote their own blog posts and presumably some of their followers might increase their followers weight as well and upvote the blog posts).
Without Vulnerabilities
The danger with other algorithms proposed for spreading out the rewards is that they hypothetically enable whales to game it by splitting up their STEEM POWER in multiple accounts, or by enabling a Sybil attack on account signups to be consolidated into powerful blocs, i.e. they don’t clearly reward productive behavior. But as far as I can see, my proposal doesn’t suffer these vulnerabilities because neither of those two attacks have any special advantage in attaining unique verified followers. My epiphany is injecting a valuable resource (the verified unique follower) which is concomitant with an activity (following and reading) that implies viral promotion and adoption. Note my proposal does not conflate curating with following, because it is not assigning a user’s followers to be that user’s curators. My proposal appears to be orthogonal to any pending decision to tweak curation rewards, since I am proposing a weighting modulation for voting power (although perhaps it could be applied to curation power if so decided).
Edit: I don’t expect my proposal to be without fault. This is to jumpstart the brainstorming process on some of the attributes I’ve identified.