I suspect a big reason bid bots are attractive is because other forms of curation are difficult. Even altruistic voting (e.g. no benefit expected, other than improved system health) is time consuming. Content is disorganized; tags are noisy, and there are no content standards.
I think this is the type of thing communities CAN help with. Even altruistic voting gives curation rewards especially if it ends up trending. That was the original design right? It encouraged people to add value which brings more and more value to the platform.
By "crowdsourced content discovery mechanism" do you mean votes and trending? Votes and trending should reflect what the community believes are the most valuable contributions, but it's not an effective way to discover under-rewarded (or just undiscovered) content.
Yes. I agree.
In my view, Steem has never had a "crowdsourced content discovery mechanism". The most effective mechanisms were (and still are) manual labor -- digging through feeds, following new users, establishing curation guilds. In the beginning, there were less posts (it was possible to read every single new post), they were higher quality on average, and time spent curating was subsidized by the excitement of it all. Now we need to scale.
I agree, I think that is still the best way, but now there is no chance for it to "trend" once you have done that work. Does scaling mean that we leave all that work to the bots? If there isn't a chance to trend organically or real human interaction, I don't see the point.
We need tools that make it easy and rewarding to curate. Say you have 1M SP and can make 50 impactful votes per day... how would you most effectively distribute them? To find 50 good but undervalued posts on steemit.com every day might take quite a while. And the modest bump to each one would not provide much exposure (e.g., on trending), which means it's unlikely for others to find it and place more votes on top (and increase your curation return). This discourages cooperation at the social layer and creates a negative feedback loop.
To me, scaling means giving users the tools to solve this dilemma.
Make a list of 100 interesting authors and check their blogs manually on a regular basis. That way you can make 40 of your 50 "impactful votes".
For the 10 remaining "impactful votes" try to find good posts from authors you have never read before to give new users a chance and some motivation to keep writing.
I don't understand why investors always talk about their ROI (here in this special case "curation return")? Their main aim should be to increase the value of STEEM. Voting for 'quality content' (and flagging bid bot supported posts) would be a contribution to a higher value ... (with or without much curation reward).
The value of a (social) network is measured among others by the number of its users.
So lets make sure that as many as possible users are having a pleasant user experience (for example also because they might get some impactful manual upvotes from time to time) and thus stay here. Lets do that as investors to save our investment.
If you have one million STEEM it's not most important to get even more STEEM, it's important to increase the value of these STEEM you already own.
For example I have much more STEEM than a year ago, but my account value has decreased significantly.
Did I need 'ROI' when I bought BTC some years ago? Or am I happy about the high value of my BTC nowadays? :)
Nothing against ROI, but I think we shouldn't be that focused on it ...
Making LISTS has actually really helped with this. I have a few different lists I use and i find my voting is EASIER and I actually do it way more often. So I think that is one really solid solution.
I have a list of my friends, I have a list of splinterlands type accounts, a list of accounts that seem to influence a lot of the conversation about steem itself, then i have a list of almost 100 photographers that's the one that has the most action.
All that was made possible thanks to Hivemind. Aka i'm talking about lists on steempeak if people didn't know. But that's not the important part it's the idea that LISTS really have done what you said.
Exactly! Well said! I guess maybe they don't use the platform, so they don't see the issue. But c'mon, how short sighted can they be. How can they not listen to so many people who use the platform. I hope you get a reply. Your point is spot on.
We do use the platform, but we also have to build the solutions necessary to fix the problems, and that simply takes time. I don't see your comment disagreeing with our views very much at and feel like we are simply talking past one another. We agree that there are problems with the system. What system doesn't have problems? We're trying to lay out very clearly how we are developing and conceptualizing the solutions we have developed and continue to develop at every layer of the stack.
If we were just front end developers, or just blockchain developers, or just middleware developers, as many in the space are, we would be able to move much faster in any one of those domains. But because no one else is doing what we're doing, we have to develop in all of these domains and the consequence is that if one has too narrow of a focus, the progress appears to be slow when in reality it is quite fast, which is why no other blockchain rivals Steem in its core value propositions, and steemit.com remains by far the most used Steem interface in the world.
I like all the things that y'all have done recently, but they don't fix the bid bot problem and I don't believe communities will either. I think they are great steps in the right direction, but why would people want to build communities in a place where vote selling dominates? I'm not talking past you. I'm replying specifically to what was said with my honest thoughts.
I'm not complaining about your pace. I'm saying that y'all could start a culture against bid bots and you haven't. You have endorsed it. What is Steem's core value proposition? My position is that Steem's core value proposition is undermined by bid bots and you aren't doing what is needed to fix it.
IMO it's likely that vote selling dominates because we lack better tools to cooperate socially (as humans). My goal with communities is to create that tool... and to help resolve many of the issues brought up in this thread.
Well, that sounds cool. I'd love to know more. It's easy to have a culture that doesn't go for bid bots. I've done it with my tribe. What concerns me is that even if several popular communities instill a culture that doesn't go for vote selling, it will still be a powerful force on Steem. I can see HF21 and 22 mitigating it to a degree, but it seems to me that bid bots will still be a dominant force as long as Steemit Inc. doesn't take a strong aporoach against them. I appreciate you interacting with me here. It is by far the most response I've gotten from the Steemit Team. I still have the concerns I've mentioned, but at least it seems to have been noticed.
Thank you all for this enlightening thread! @richardcrill, I share your views; at the same time, if the Steemit Team hasn't yet addressed the bid bots phenomenon (and doesn't seem to be eager to include it on its short or mid-term roadmap), isn't it a hint about the bid bots global function in the platform?
I mean: if (plausibly) 85% of the Steemit users would prefer this mechanism to be banned, and the Team turns a deaf ear to that community desire, it leads into thinking that the small minority benefiting from those bots activity is considered by the Team to be ultimately more a structural profit driver than a malfunction.
The reason why Steemit Inc. doesn't call out bidbots and seek to nip them in the bud is because unlike Richard here, they understand economics. They understand that bidbots were a pleasant surprise, and Ned even pointed this out in a video recording. It is an interesting new form of business model that requires the buying of a large sum of STEEM and staking it.
I sincerely doubt that the majority actually do want bidbots removed. I hear the word "majority" a lot from what I bet is actually the loud minority.
And even if the majority do want bidbots gone I bet they would regret that decision the moment the bidbots left. Why? Because in all likelihood, that $0.07 upvote you just got from gentlebot would be worth $0.01 or less. This is because the bidbot businesses are a big part of the demand in today's STEEM demand/supply ratio.
In the end of the day, nobody cares how much STEEM they get, they care how much Steem Backed Dollars they get. SBD depends on demand for the STEEM supply and this means that long time stakers, like businesses, help increase the amount of SBD you can get from upvotes.
Want your STEEM bags to go to the moon? Then encourage more people to open up shop as upvote services. They don't have to be "bidbots" but upvote services of all kinds, be it contests, not-for-profit organizations like @ocdb and also the for-profit ones. Why? Because they buy a lot of STEEM and then they lock it up as SP for a very long time. That is very good for the price of Steem Backed Dollars.
Upvote services are not expensive, usually they can even get you more STEEM than you had originally, so its kind of like paying for promotion where you get all the money back... Cool right? Totally...
On top of that, not only is the bidbot's STEEM locked up, but the people using those bidbots are locking up STEEM too! That's right, they are locking up STEEM because they have to go buy STEEM and pay the bidbot, and they have to wait 7 days to only get HALF of the STEEM back! Let me show you with some math how this works...
Let's say your account is set to get rewarded in 50% SBD/ 50% SP, well that means that when you send 20 STEEM to @rewardpooleater you get an upvote of 27+ STEEM which will take 7 days before you get it. However, when you get that 27 STEEM (-25%) it comes out as 20.25 divided between Steem Backed Dollars and Steem Power. Half of your STEEM gets returned to you as automatically staked/locked up STEEM!
This is very good news for other STEEM hodlers, because your liquid STEEM just got cut in half, which means that if you want to promote another post at the same 20 STEEM you're going to have to go out and buy someone else's STEEM. This creates a much needed sink for the cryptocurrency, one that has the potential to become an ever continuous cycle.
But wait!!! Wouldn't the 20 STEEM you spent go to the upvote service and immediately get sold on the market as profit? Not necessarily, because the more upvote services come into existence the more competitive the services will need to become. This means that as new upvote service businesses arrive (after buying a wicked ton of STEEM to power up) the original gangsters will need to offer something the new guys can't like MORE POWERFUL upvotes or more lucrative ROIs to their customers/users.
No, Steemit Inc. does not want that to go away, because they're not stupid. In an industry where everyone is making a coin/token and everyone else is asking what their utility is, STEEM actually has a legit utility in the real world: promotion. Another token also has that same utility and its called the Minds.com token, but that utility is quite centralized. Steemians should be quite proud to say that the promotional utility of STEEM in the form of upvote services is decentralized, because anyone can offer the service by buying up STEEM.
Thanks for your support. :)
By the way, I am looking forward for the communities to come. They should be a step into the right direction ...
Yeah, definitely. Me too.
Could it be because they are investors?
That would be like working hard for a whole day and sharing the pay with thousands of other people...
You can't expect most people sacrifice their time and effort mostly for the benefit of others like that. The fact that it is fruitless to expect that caused socialism to fall.
The problem here is misaligned incentives.
I don't think PoB can even theoretically work very well except in communities where most of the stake is controlled by a single app that rewards content creators strictly according to quality. Under that scenario, the main stakeholder has enough power and an incentive to curb abuse and reward commensurately to value created.
Steem with its fast block processing time and free transactions is well suited to serve as the base layer powering an archipelago of such token economies. EIP+WP is a step toward Steem becoming a non-PoB base layer and that's a good thing. Those things will help Steem limp onwards, hopefully for a few years more, to spread stake further before content rewards can be discontinued for good.
Unfortunately, Steemit, Inc still controls too large a stake for Steem to be sufficiently decentralized to be secure against external threats. As long as a form of PoB is practiced with STEEM, SBD and Vests, it would be in the best interests of Steemit, Inc as the largest stakeholder to help the community fight abusive maximisers and non-economic abusers who harass community members for their personal gratification. That would also help. Doing it correctly is easier said than done but it's an issue that should be on the table.
I would prefer to share a huge cake with others instead to have a very small cake for myself alone.
Again, if their behaviour contributed to a higher STEEM price, and if they have a lot of STEEM, I couldn't see a sacrifice at all.
As I said, I consider myself as investor, as well, I have earned quite some STEEM within the last one and a half year ... and the value of my account has decreased a lot at the same time: the size of the cake matters, not one's percentage of the cake.
I plead for a committee of elected users with some delegated Steem power from Steemit, Inc., which could decide which stuff to flag and also (in case someone complains) if flags are justified or not, and if "yes" just counter them with upvotes.
In addition, accounts who repeatedly misuse flags in an abusive way (instead using them against spam, plagiarism etc.) could be flagged, as well, after a decision of that committee.
I don't know what you'd consider good but stuff like this deserves to go undiscovered not earning nearly $150.00 using bidbots to go trending.
https://steemit.com/art/@jellenmark/thanos-reimagined-with-infinity-2019-7-1-16-59-28
You guys actually think that people are going to downvote crap like this after the hardfolk to keep folks like this in line but the reality is when brought out into the spotlight in a post not even SFR would touch it because of who was behind paying the bidbots on it. This post was at the most worth about as much as the paper it was written on. This is one of the major reason Steem can't get out of it slump and attract new users.
I wouldn't neccesarily decide that I had to give an equal vote to 50 post for one thing. I would give votes at different percentages based on what I thought they deserved. I do see this dilemna and that's why I'm not railing against delegation or curation guilds. My points were mainly about bidbots. How do bidbots help to scale?
Or a better way to put that question: why not just use delegation and curation guilds instead of bid bots? Bid bots are what undermines the trending page. So shouldn't we focus on solutions that don't undermine the trending page and the whole idea of curation in the first place?
Before bidbots were selfvoters and circle jerks. @haejin and @ranchorelaxo, for example. @berniesanders for another. Bots aren't the source of evil, they just automate it.
@berniesanders actually made the first bid bot. But yes circle jerking is another seperate problem. Because there are other problems, does that mean it's not worth trying stop this problem?
I'm aware of @randowhale. All I'm saying is that plugging one hole just forces leaks to come out of others. I'm an original advocate of preventing all bots from voting, and have posted how this can be done.
Even though selfvoting and circlejerks would still be a problem, that problem would at least be something actual people did, rather than devices. I reckon infesting social networks with bots devalues people, and find that more offensive than financial problems themselves.
YOU ARE ON THE NAUGHTY LIST. YOU HAVE BEEN FLAGGED. GOODBYE.
If you look back in steemd you see that @ranchorelaxo was @haejin's bank, and Bernie was at war with @haejin. That's my recollection of the affair anyway. If you mean that the whole conflict was made for TV, then I would be suitably impressed by the cunning such a pretense would reveal.
Edit: also, please don't bring up gaping holes in this context. I.. I just can't even...
I definitely see how delegation and curation guilds can be justified for the reasons you mentioned. And I see the use in projects like @curie and @tribesteemup, but those don't make the entire trending page sold to the highest bidder like bid bots do.
It isn't social media when bots are the voters. Society isn't even involved in curation then. It's just mining with automated tools. I've no interest in mining. I'm here for the ideas people exchange.
That's where the actual value of Steem is: the social interaction.
Well yes, but the original design was for curation rewards to be 50%, and they also did not have the penalty for the first 30-, 15- or soon to be 5-minutes. The changes that were made later, largely impulsively and without good rationale, undermined a lot of that balance to the point that curation rewards became almost meaningless, and the incentives to just sell votes became overwhelmingly strong.
The hope is that HF21 is going to re-balance those incentives somewhat back toward what you describe, where altruistic or at least non-agnostic voting isn't so heavily penalized relative to vote selling. We'll see how it works out but it's certainly a step toward what you describe.
Oh really, I didn't even realize it was originally 50/50. I hit 3 years here the other day and as far as I'm aware it's always been 75/25 during that time. I could be wrong about that as I'm just going off of memory.
I do think HF21 is a step in the right direction towards rebalancing those incentives. I'll be paying close attention to see the effects. I like the idea of incentivizing that altruistic behavior and I might even prefer that to instilling it as a culture, but I'm open to both routes to moving away from vote selling completely.
The change from 50/50 was made in mid 2016 so it is quite possible you weren't around for it.
@schoolofminnows is the solution to all your problems.
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No it's not.
Yes it is
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