So after a long discussion with @eonwarped in the last post, I thought it would be good to write up a clearer post about how the change in hardfork 20 from early vote curation rewards increasing the author's share to early vote curation rewards being returned to the pool came about, why it's a bad idea, and what we should do about it instead.
This started, as I understand it, because some authors were using the way early voting works to gain a significant advantage in post rewards. A large early vote changes the percentages that a post pays out to the author and the curators, sometimes drastically. This can be a significant exploit, especially when combined with bot votes.
One way to think about it is that an early vote takes money away from the curators. By manipulating the timing of self-votes and bot-votes, authors have been able to take money from the curation pool and move it into the author pool, essentially directing that money from curators to themselves. The hardfork 20 change is to take that reward away from the author and destroy it instead, giving it to no one. Its proponents like to call this "returning it to the rewards pool" because it essentially functions the same as voting on a declined-rewards post - the rshares are used but don't go to anyone, so they aren't used to determine where the rewards pool is distributed.
I'm intimately familiar with this exploit; I use it both for my own benefit and to make my outgoing votes more powerful. On my own posts I chain bot votes in this fashion to increase my rewards. And 2/3 of my voting power is in @themesopotamians project which votes at minute-zero specifically to give the authors I support more value under this system.
I agree that this is a bug. However, I believe that the bug has been mischaracterized.
The solution proposed in hardfork 20 is to remove the bonus author rewards and destroy them instead. I already wrote a lot about why that has ridiculous side effects, but I want to look at how @eonwarped described the bug early in the discussion on that post:
this weird quirk where currently the author themselves can assign value to their own posts without any feedback from others.
This is true, but it's secondary. It's an exploit of the bug, but it's not the bug itself, and part of the problem with the hf20 approach is that we're treating it as the bug.
The bug is that early votes reduce the curation pool.
When I put it that simply, it's really self-evidently kind of stupid, isn't it? If you vote early enough to not get a curation reward, then the other curators don't get it either. Currently the author gets it, which is strange. In HF20 nobody will get it at all, which is stranger.
How about if we just stop that from happening? Conveniently, we wouldn't even have to change the FAQ:
Of the 25% that goes to the curator, that portion will be split between the author and the curator if the curator votes within the first 30 minutes. The split of the 25% between the author and curator during the first 30 minutes is calculated linearly based on the time the vote is cast.
If a post is upvoted the moment of posting, 100% of the curation reward goes to the author.
At 3 minutes, 90% goes to the author and 10% to the curator.
At 15 minutes it's a 50/50 split.
At 27 minutes, 10% goes to the author and 90% to the curator.
If a post is upvoted 30 min after posting, 100% of the curation reward goes to the curator.
The way that I read this when I first arrived here is that if you vote at minute zero 100% of your vote goes to the author, and you generate no curation at all. That's not what happens - in fact you generate just as much curation reward as you would have if there was no early voting penalty, it just goes to the author instead of to you. The other way makes a lot more intuitive sense, and it solves the bug without a lot of the silly side effects of the HF20 plan.
So here's my proposal:
- A vote at minute zero goes 100% to the author, 0% to the curation pool, and generates zero curation for the voter.
- A post at minute fifteen goes 75% to the author, 25% to the curation pool, and generates 100% curation for the voter.
- All three scale linearly in between.
This keeps the amount of the vote that goes to curation in line with the amount of curation reward that goes to the vote. It still allows voters to give a little bonus to the author by voting early, but it's only a portion of their own vote, not anyone else's. 25% of any vote after fifteen minutes goes to curation on that post, period. We don't have to worry about giving away any portion of the curation to the author, or the pool, or Aunt Betty, because it all goes to the post's curators, where it ought to have been going in the first place. No matter when you vote on a post you don't take value away from anyone else. No matter when you vote on a post, all the value of your vote goes to someone involved with that post.
This may be a little harder to code but it shouldn't be at all difficult. And it makes the system work in a way that we can explain to other people without a tl;dr post like this one.
