Appreciate it. There are a lot of potential optimizations we could make but I think its more important to settle on an initial spec and make tweaks and optimizations after its had time to run live. I lean towards keeping it at 1.5x because its not a guarantee a curator will actually make 1.5x back. It depends on other factors like trust and overall score in a week. We target 1.5x but some will get over 1.5, some less. But the higher we can reasonably make it the more likely it is that more curators meet that target or fall somewhere close to it.

The drawdown idea addressed a real weakness of the initial plan, but going beyond that I prefer to have real data to back-up or justify additional follow-ups and changes.

Also, I may be totally off here, but some large sections of your reply seem copy-pasted directly from AI. Just from the length of your response and formatting. I don't care if you use AI to brainstorm or explore ideas, but at the very least share them in your own words please.

I ran a probe on the database and did a timing analysis. Heres what the data actually tells us:

Tipping before reading is rare. The first tip on an item usually arrives hours later: about 2.5 hours on the median. Measured against each item's reading time, almost no tips came in faster than the item could be read. We can't prove that the tippers actually read the post before tipping, but we also can't assume they didn't.

Familiar names do get tipped faster. Posts by the 10 most-tipped authors get their first tip after about 80 minutes on the median, against about 170 minutes for everyone else.

This data can’t determine if this is a group of regulars who simply write the best content or these are organic personal networks In a young community of about 50 tippers. Some of this is expected. But it is the “certain names” effect being described, and it shows up as concentration rather than speed. Still, we don't want to take any action to penalize what could be perfectly legitimate behavior and good content simply being tipped for being good content.

In response I would propose a time window from, say 2 hours, in which any tips during that window treats everyone as tied for the "first tip bonus". This takes away whatever speed advantage exists.

We could also hide the tip totals for the first few hours, this mitigates the "Early tips also don’t just predict the outcome, they cause it.", but the posts would still be ranked by those hidden tips, so users could see it in the LIT feed and know its been tipped even if they can't see how much its been tipped.

As for the concern of tipping the name rather than the content, the most impactful thing we could do is perhaps hide the authors' name for the first same 2 hour window, so that anyone who does tip it first, gets that first tip bonus without being able to confirm who the author is. Although this isn't bulletproof. Authors' writing can be recognized, or the author could share their Stasher content elsewhere. There are other ways the authors' name could leak as well. We would have to hide the post from the author's profile as well, from follower notifications, hiding the "OP" badge from replies under that post, and hiding the content from the RSS feed, to name a few things.

In short, trying to address this "people tip certain popular authors" is requires extremely invasive solutions that come with big trade-offs. We also can't beyond a shadow of a doubt confirm that this is whats happening rather than explaining it as this being a young platform with few tippers, and good authors getting tipped for legitimately good content.

So I would not suggest we take any action at this time, but rather revisit the topic in several months if we still feel this is an issue. Personally, I don't think it will be an issue as the platform grows, but the data will give us some evidence.

Honestly the best thing to do is wait and observe, and at the most, introduce the "Anyone tipping in the first 2 hours" counts as first.

The drawdown suggestion is a winner. Planning to include this into the spec to replace the glide. The target then becomes 1.5x the tipped amount while the spending limit allows rather than as long as the pool has reserves.

The formula becomes
I4 = average income, last 4 weeks
limit = (I4 + reserve ÷ 13) ÷ 1.1
budget = min(1.5 × T4, limit)

https://stasher.news/uploads/905

still processing other feedback offered.

Thanks for the incredibly detailed feedback. This is a treasure trove of information. Will be processing everything and considering potential actions to address the largest findings.

The incentive to post and create good original content is receiving uptips. The incentive needs to be for uptipping or else few would do it. Ranking and spreading trust is also dependent on uptips.

As an example, Doug told me that users can tip eachother on the xmrbazaar forums, but that feature is almost never used because there is no incentive to do it.

But there could be something in the future where the top N posts of a given week or month get a small bonus from the rewards pool. Something to brainstorm another time, its not needed for the core game theory.

Also, related: Did an investigation into the skew to goliath in the weekly rewards. Its due to how trust spreads from the seed accounts to users. Trust is part of the score that determines your weight on tipped items and therefore your eventual share of the rewards as well.

The web of trust has a warmup period while this trust spreads to users. It just so happened that goliath built trust early and the platform is very new and hasn't had time to build a proper web of trust. As the graph widens, more turfs with active trust, more accounts holding it, that early advantage fades. Next distribution should see those trust scores normalize even further. So if you tipped a lot in the previous weeks and didn't see what you expected or were not eligible at all, that should improve gradually. Next Monday's distribution is the first run with a sufficiently wide trust graph and trust built in almost all the current Turfs.

My bank account is empty 90% of the time. <3

tipping the winning posts seems like the best way. Tagging the users to let them know they've won might also be useful.

congrats on stasher's most active post to date.

deleted by author

Thanks for chiming in. The more I think about it, the more I'm thinking it should be even lower. 0.6 XMR is over $300 now. and the Monero price keeps rising steadily. The curator rewards aren't meant to "get your blood pumping". Its an incentive for participation, not a paycheck that is owed to anyone. Past a certain weekly amount, it could become a detraction and make people focus on the wrong thing. They will focus on the optimizing to receive a reward, rather than organic participation and upvoting things because they actually like or agree with the content.

The donations to the pool were an incredible gift that should sustain and help the platform grow so that it can start accumulating its own rewards organically instead of through large infrequent donations. The point is not to distribute everything as quickly as possible and then leave people disappointed when it runs out. That leads to speculative degenerate behavior, and short term users who just show up opportunistically.

Not to mention that most users don't fully grasp how the rewards are allocated. 50%+ of the pool goes to the few users who do understand it. Stasher News is nowhere near the adoption levels needed to warrant $300 weekly payments. We barely even have 300 users.

I am strongly considering using my veto powers and just setting it to the amount I determine is sufficient and just endure any backlash that comes from it. My one job is to ensure the platform survives.

curators already have a score and the pool will reward based on that score. I'm not sure what benefit separate pools would create. Seems like an overcomplication to me.

We are opensource by the way. The code is public.

I'll lay it out:

Who's eligible. During the reward week you must have:

1. Tipped a post or comment that was created that same week (tipping old content doesn't count),
2. on an item that finished in the top half of posts (or comments) by net vote weight,
3. with your tips on that item totaling more than 0.0001 XMR,
4. and a payout address registered  no address, no payout, share rolls over.

The stasher account (me) is no longer eligible for rewards or referrals. Staff/founder accounts tip at half weight.

Your score. For each qualifying item you tipped:

score = (fourth root)(your tips on it) × timing bonus × the item's popularity share

• (fourth root): tip 0.0001 XMR → weight 100. Tip 1 XMR → weight 1,000. Ten-thousand times the money buys only 10× the weight. whales can't buy the pool, and splitting one tip into many pieces counts the same as one (consecutive tips from the same person are merged).
• Timing bonus: 1st tip on an item ×1.00, 2nd ×0.76, 3rd ×0.64, 4th ×0.57… early curation beats late pile-on.
• Popularity share: the item's vote weight ÷ total vote weight of all qualifying posts that week. Vote weight is the same score that ranks content: every upvote counts its tipper's trust × log of their tip so votes from established accounts move an item more than votes from fresh ones. Posts and comments are two separate contests, each gets half the pot.

Your payout.

payout = your total score ÷ everyone's total score × pot

Example: three eligible curators, scores 100 / 60 / 40. That's 0.3 / 0.18 / 0.12 XMR of a 0.6 pot.

come Vote: #341032

Vote: #341032

https://stasher.news/uploads/830

https://stasher.news/uploads/831

you can also paste images into the text field, which is what I did to attach the two images above.

hope that helps.

1 XMR was my arbitrary suggestion in the poll thread, and since nobody offered other suggestions I went with 0.6 a conservative amount. There wasnt much time to get feedback on the amount with only two days until the next distribution.

We can always increase the amount up to 1 XMR per week for the following weeks if the community prefers it. No money is lost, only delayed.

All eligible users still end up receiving the amount they deserve, whether its all in one week, or over 10 weeks. Unless of course a user intended to leave and stop participating after getting one big paycheck.

I suppose I have no clue what you're talking about. You can clarify, or yes, assume it will not be implemented.

you mention a button to make it into an image. what is "it"?
you can already attach images and videos, and previews are rendered for all media. you want a screenshot button?

Thanks.

This was already addressed earlier this week. Any posts from before the fix won't show a preview, but new posts should work correctly. as such:
https://shi.meowing.de/rottenwheel1/status/2108405121289752920