Preface
As many of you already know, I created the manual curation project called Operation Curation Delegation @ocd. Ever since I joined the platform I have been manually curating posts from all kinds of users, it started out by following newcomers and active authors of all sorts of content, nowadays I mostly follow those that post about stuff I am interested in.
After I received delegation to aid me in a more effective curation and the flow of new posts that started appearing with the increase in user-base I needed some help to spread the votes even wider and make sure as few authors as possible of quality and original content were left behind. I announced OCD over 5 months ago and today we are at 35 manual curators actively searching for content and around 150 total compilation posts of 5-10 unique authors per post nominated and supported and a bunch more that have been re-steemed.
Not only do we incentivize the curators to do a good job at finding these posts, but we also reward the authors with over 2 times the value the curators make. The purpose of the project is to keep user retention high, give authors that extra push to gain an audience and continue creating content without having to pay for votes.
The Problem
One of the problems today on the platform stands with services that provide you with voting support for a fee. This may not be a problem for everyone or something we may notice short term, but I believe it will cause more damage and affect the platforms health in the long run.
Its still a pretty fresh issue and many users are debating and discussing over it, but here are my main concerns with it.
Even though the short term benefits from buying votes might seem great (pay 1$ to receive 2$ in votes) many seem to not realize the consequences this has, such as:
- Users receiving bought votes indirectly take rewards from those that don't since we all share the same reward pool.
- Now there are middleman services that provides these offers and profit from every purchase and possible curation rewards.
- The bigger users enabling these services through delegations get paid for their votes directly instead of through the limited reward pool that offers curation rewards based on their stake.
- It makes the platform look "pay2win" which is frowned upon on most other places and according to me not what Steem is about.
The reasoning I've heard as to why these services are good:
- Smaller and new users would not make anything if they couldn't buy a boost for their posts.
- Smaller and new users wouldn't get any attention if they didn't buy votes to boost their posts to "Hot" or "Trending".
With these they seem to forget that:
On every platform, whether its Youtube, Facebook, Instagram or other similar ones users start out by doing "The Grind" as user @exyle has explained in his posts. This means that there should not be instant gratification to earn rewards or become "famous". Sure some users who already are famous might receive more attention when they first join the platform and bring along their follower-base, but those are an exception. For us regular users it should be about connecting with like-minded people, learning how to use your voting power efficiently to build a following and interact with others, etc.
Users should be able to start from scratch and use their activity and time spent on the site to start seeing rewards build up for them, not have to pay to be able to take a shortcut. It creates a sense of unfairness and not just through the distribution of rewards but also attention.
There is a way on Steemit to be able to pay for attention and that is the "Promoted" tab, which means that each time you spend some Steem Dollars to promote a post it will end up in that section and the Steem Dollars will be sent to an account that effectively burn them making it so that everyone on the platform gains from it depending on their stake, not just a few middlemen that offer the paying for votes services and those enabling them with delegations. Sure that system may not be very popular and lacking of views and attention, but we can't forget that the platform is still at its early stages and that part has not been worked on very much. A few users from the @busy team have added an extra incentive to the Promoted tab which gives you a vote if you use $D to promote your post.
There are many other consequences with these, such as users buying votes just to raise reputation for future malicious activity. Decrease in manual curation of these posts and letting authors who might not be writing that great content be able to ROI faster than the platform usually allows through the usual methods while those enabling this still profit the most. I don't want to get too deep into that as that's not what this post is about, its about trying to find other solutions to it, or at the very least something that can compete versus these services - if not through ROI then hopefully through good faith and wanting the platform and value of Steem to rise in the future.
As I said these services are pretty new to the platform, thus what I have been discussing may not be 100% accurate and represents more my thoughts and fears of how it can be abused and the damage it can do.
Our Solution
Like a few other curation projects out there, the oldest and biggest being @curie. We strive on curating new authors who write quality content and are underappreciated in general either due to being early or just because of the masses of people posting making them hard to spot. We currently have between 800-1000 unique authors we have picked up so far, although our efforts to give them a boost in rewards and attention may often have been for a single time only, we've always had it in mind to do it in a more continual fashion. This is why we are now sharing with you our ideas of the OCD-bot and what it entails.
I've been lucky to be in contact with a great developer called @pharesim who is one of the early Steemians and has put great efforts into distributing stake widely by following many manual curators with his own account. He will be taking care of the coding of the bot and making sure it flows the way it should.
How the bot will operate
We will be accepting delegations to the bot account from Steemians interested in helping out with this project and receiving all of the curation rewards back depending on the amount they have delegated.
We will start by automating 60% of the daily voting power to curate on all previous authors nominated by OCD, limiting support to a few posts per week depending on how much voting power is being used.
We will be scanning all outgoing votes and blacklist abusers from the bot support.
20% will go into the new authors we nominate daily and thus will be voted on manually. This 20% will possibly have increased curation rewards as the bot will front-run my votes if the target $20 reward per post is not met.
We will also use the bot to curate on the daily OCD compilation posts which the rewards are shared among the curators, these votes will also be front-running mine thus providing more curation rewards to the delegatees.
Possible vote scaling on a reversed busy.org format, where authors will receive bigger votes depending on the lack of followers with high SP they have.
This pre-announcement serves also as a way to discuss the effectiveness of the bot and if our community has some improvement ideas. We would love to hear them out so please feel free to voice your concerns, questions and further discussions in the comments.
As many other blockchain enthusiasts we at OCD strive for a fair distribution toward our user-base and not having the need for middlemen earning on our efforts.
Thank you for reading, we are looking forward to start and improve along the way.
This is an interesting one to me, I still consider myself pretty mew to this platform in the sense of know what works what doesn't etc. I pretty much tried out all the bots to see what they do and how it affects followers and upvotes.
In my ideal version of steemit there would be no bots and no selling votes, I think that is just a version that is not as easy to "gamify". When I first got here I knew bots were already in place and the ability to buy votes was already established, that's the way it was and it was not "coded" out. As soon as someone tells me there are bots and the ability to buy votes I can instantly create a million scenarios of how that is going to be used so I never had some "ideal" or wanted it to be different than it was. I just looked at it as ok I know what I'm getting into so I have to deal with it or not bother.
The view of buying votes maing it appear pay to play is a valid point but on the same hand it sort of already is pay to play, sink money in and buy steempower and upvote for more. People already complain about that a lot simply from that angle. Which again to me was, hey that's jut way system was set up so I knew what I was getting into and the same reason I bought thousands of steem.
The problem I see is how does anyone actually stop the vote buying ? if you don't stop it then its going to be used. In my mind its like going to war and one country has nukes but the other country says ok nukes are destructive to the environment so we wont use them. You know who is going to win. Unless the actual developers make it an issue and try to stamp it out I almost view it as a loosing battle. I am not one to full on pay for tons of votes and try to "abuse" it but I do try new things out like hitting trending page just recently to see how it effects me. As of Now it just seems to have gotten me a lot of spam comments and some grief for being a "vote buyer" but I still view it as just trying things out.
Your plan sounds like almost a view of patreon but spread out which In some ways I think is a good idea to help boost lots of newer accounts with quality content. I do worry it could be seen as just another bot and another way to "game" the system but I guess I don't ponder it too deeply because I think in how I see steemit even something like that wouldn't be allowed because I could imagine quickly other people setting up the same sort of system but without your good intentions.
Not sure where that leaves me on the topic but it is something I keep an eye on to see how all this develops because I think your warning is a valid one and a possible outcome. The one thing I know is to be "successful" here you need actual real people who enjoy your work and are willing to upvote on a consistent basis and that's my long term goal. How I go about trying to achieve that may very as I try things but my goal remains the same.
Good luck with the project and I will donate some sp to the cause to try it out and help some quality work.
Hi again! I have posted the proposal of which is inspired in part, to this post and discussion. I have since posted a proposal for the rectification of this problem as I have mentioned in the earlier comment here.
You are mentioned in the post. Have a read!
Growing Unhappiness with Upvote Bots on Steemit
Proposal for New 'Promoted' Function
"it sort of already is pay to play, sink money in and buy steempower and upvote for more"
"if you don't stop it then its going to be used. In my mind its like going to war and one country has nukes but the other country says ok nukes are destructive to the environment so we wont use them. You know who is going to win."
Thank you for pointing out what should be blindingly obvious.
Code is law. Fix the code or give it up. Write the pull request or find someone who can.
Extremely relevant:
https://steemit.com/steem/@lexiconical/code-is-law-only-when-i-want-otherwise-it-s-abuse-the-shaming-syndicate-of-steemit-our-own-brand-of-sjws-and-social-repression
PS - Can we LOL at this part together:
"There is a way on Steemit to be able to pay for attention and that is the "Promoted" tab"
As much the 'Promoted' tab exists, I think it is pretty clear that it does not work for everybody.
I made a post in regards to how Upvoting Services are affect the Steemit ecosystem and a proposal for the solution of which is to revamp the 'Promoted' tab.
Have a look maybe?
Growing Unhappiness with Upvote Bots on Steemit
Proposal for New 'Promoted' Function
If i had read your comment before posting mine i would have saved ten minutes of my life. Agree with you completely.
I read yours and thought you phrased it better than me :) nice work as well in your blog I gave you a follow.
I think we have expressed the same concerns just in different words. So i thought would have saved me the trouble of writing just by endorsing you. Following you as well. Cheers!
That is a false statement, and an idiotic (in my opinion) statement. I have not bought any votes, I have only called on o-works a couple of times, (my wife wanted to know how it worked) on my own work. I have for other people's work though. I have muted a lot of bots, mostly resteem bots, they seemed to be everywhere last month. I have also muted several minnow support type bots.
If someone wants money or a vote from me to provide a service that promises even a 2% ROI, then it is an unsustainable system. Unless of course the person making the offer is doing so out of a philanthropic heart.
I just made it 100 days on steemit, and the only help I have had along the way, has been the votes of other steemians. I now have 157SP, and my vote is worth just slightly more than a penny.
To conclude the number 1. reason for needing a paid for vote scheme is just that a scheme. Of course that is just my opinion, I am sure some people that have been here for more than 9 months might disagree with me, and some would agree. That is life.
"I just made it 100 days on steemit, and the only help I have had along the way, has been the votes of other steemians. I now have 157SP, and my vote is worth just slightly more than a penny."
In other words, you've made next to no money or reputation. In over 3 months, at current price, you are averaging about $1.40 a day. Perhaps if you lived in Mongolia, this would qualify as an OK minimum wage job.
Gee, it sounds like this applies to you:
"Smaller and new users would not make anything if they couldn't buy a boost for their posts."
If this was a job for me, or a second form of needed income it would be a very poor choice I agree. But the fact is it is not a second income for me, and as you have pointed out if it was it would be a poor choice. I'm just here for the fun of it, not to make money. The money part is a nice bonus though. Unlike you I do not have 25,000 dollars laying around to "invest" in stemmit. So I pretty much just use the social side of steemit. Congratulations to you and all the success you have had since June of this year.
we paid much more for our steem. both lexi and I have actually lost a lot.
it was more like 65000 =( and 110000 =(
With the advent of SMT's coming, and the news of a big investor, maybe you will begin to see a return on your investment. There is always the possibility of steem going up.
yes i am hoping. price hasnt moved yet from that 20 million story.
With all the holidays and things slowing down, maybe mid Jan. or Feb. I really don't know or follow the stock markets or crypto very much. Just guessing like everyone else things slow to a hectic pace about now till Jan 10th or so. And really no loss until you start to withdraw.
@nikez452 have you heard of APPICS. HODL your steem and expect to get a big return in July as that is when the price of steem will go up again.
Nice, I'm just approaching 2 months, probably like 45 days right now. I'd say this approach to the platform is the most steady. Steem has been volatile and the platform is evolving so it feels better to me to go slowly and just produce the content that I like along the way.
I do think that it's interesting to track account SP and Reputation against each other. I think there is probably some correlation depending how a user approaches publishing in terms of schedule and originality (thats saying nothing for depth or frequency which I think are also factors to a degree).
At any rate, it's good to see other folks that joined around the months that I did and learn about the perspective to Steemit. Thanks for putting your thoughts up here.
hmm
Solid points above. I'd add that anything established users can do to help newer users like myself to progress into an engaging community here on the platform is going to help retention and also probably incentivize those users organically. That's at least how I've approached it.
I'd say that I have been lucky to advance in terms of reputation fairly quickly via photography and travel posts. However, getting deeper into the media and technology topics here makes me feel like I should develop more depth for them so they take significantly more effort.
With that said, I've used a paid vote service once and didn't really find it to be a great advantage. There are probably others or better producers but I'm not sure I want to have those accounts associated with mine.
Still learning here. Thanks for sharing these ideas though. It's really useful for me to get perspective from users that have been watching the platform and token ecosystem develop for a while.
It will be absolutely destructive if not nipped in the butt, or at the very least diluted in impact, soon enough. Steem(it) as an experiment may succeed or fail over how we manage to deal with bots and their economy.
Bots are good. Pay2Win is e(xc)lusive.
I 100% agree!
Bots like minnowbooster could eventually turn into the cancer of steem(it).
However, bots like originalworks and cheetah are essential for steem(it) to grow.
You know my thoughts on the current situation so when the time comes to take delegations, you get mine.
Hopefully some of the large accounts see platform and future potential value of this and get behind it also.
An interesting concept, I was already hoping for something like "send me SBD and I will upvote you"-bot, as they are urgently required on Steemit[/joke]
In my perspective, OCD is popular and successful curation group, even though I can imagine it's not easy to run it in a perfect (or even good) manner to suit what you would except from it.
The great thing for good creators is that they do not need to understand OCD or OCD bot, if they will only reach the attention they deserve.
I fully agree with and support you.
I delegated steempower for curation on Korean community.
We need more curator in Kr community
I wish your concern on Kr community.
We will be adding more Asian language curators to OCD soon and hopefully be able to support them all in the future through the bot that is being worked on. I appreciate your support and manual curating on the platform!
Will the bot be running from the @ocd account? (Using @ocd SP and VP) and then delegations would go there? Or would it be a separate account that would be added for this purpose.
I love the idea of having a running list of people who have been nominated getting a bit more consistent votes. It also gives an opportunity for people to trail quality content and guaranteed curation rewards by front running you
It will be on a different account and the daily new authors we find added to the list it supports.
Great points there, there were many things that I've learnt especially from what you've pointed out especially the use of paid services and promoted tabs. I have heard of @exyle speak of the grind before and it is very true.
What you are doing makes a difference. I remember seeing @curie and your vote on my second post. It's very encouraging and keeps me writing. Do let me know if there's help you need. Until then, keep rocking on!
That's a brilliant way to support people who are constantly churning out quality content! Nice way to encourage those who have been nominated before but have not had any success after the nomination.
This is a great vision, and I am glad that you will make it happen. I strongly believe this will help balance the reward distribution to people who are creating unique contents, and attract more people to join to flourish the platform.
Thanks for the hard work, and looking forward to the new bot. Cheers.
I am for any project to support the new users who arrive with good content, this sounds like another step in that direction.
A special mention to @pharesim who's 500k SP is spread so thinly that he earns very little for his stake.
A vote bot front-running your account is also a generous decision.
Cheers guys!
Oh yeah, I recently wrote about the 'sizing issues' of these bid bots after recent mega payouts - the key point being the mega-whale withdrawing his delegation to them.
Man, I'm really glad that you found my content on here and that I got to know you a bit. I really think you're one of the best people on this platform and you actually strive to make it a better place. I don't really have any suggestions on improving the bot, but I'm looking forward to seeing how it performs and all the good it'll bring, man!
It's good that you're spreading those manual upvotes around. I've seen too many new members pumped up at the start and then lose interest when they see no support for their work.
I have recently started trying different things out to increase exposure to my posts. It's encouraging to see a service like this to help with user retention. Upvoted!
source
👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
Amazing idea Acid!
Simply make the promote feature more attractive and people will start using it.I tried the promote feature a couple times and always got not more than 1/6th back from what I paid.
#NoWonder
Thanks @acidyo and everyone else involved, for doing what you can to make this platform even better. As a fairly new author, I've found it relatively tough to get any recognition, but I'm excited by the challenge of continuously producing better and better content and I'm extremely excited to see this platform grow.
Thanks for your hard work which is continually making Steemit a better place. I am wondering whether you would consider choosing some Chinese curators for your OCD projects in the future.
For sure!
Great!
Fully support you to be Chinese curator!
Thanks!!
Awesome! Looking forward to hearing more, and thank you for considering my post! :)
This is a great topic and thank you guys for trying to address this issue. Since we are building our application on Steem blockchain and since i have also noticed this happening i gave it a lot of thought but i probably know the system too little and i was unable to come up with any kind of solution. Not yet at least.
Whereas money is involved good faith and good will will only go to an extent. Profit and rational spending will always take over. Just like in life, as steemit is a perfect life social simulation.
But that are not the rewards that i am concerned the most, i am afraid it will go to such an extent that will jeopardize the whole concept of Steemit as a platform. While other apps with their SMT and their adjusted distribution mechanism might solve this in one way or another, if nothing is done on higher level, but left for good will of a few Steemians, no matter how big they are Steemit might just end up as Pay to go as you've said. It's always "Follow the money" at the end of the day.
I might have tried to boost a post a time or two just for the sake of an experiment and i have been using promoted tab quite a lot in the beginning, but that does not compete. Not in the sense of rewards, but in the sense of exposure. Very few venture to promoted section at all.
I am not concerned about earnings on my posts in my particular case, i just want to increase visibility. As long as visibility is sorted by the value of upvotes i am afraid it will not work. Having in mind token distribution and concentration it's going to be the guys who have most money who will be earning the most (and that's ok) but the rest of the community that is creating the quality content is not even getting enough exposure due to the fact that content discovery mechanism either do not work at all or work poorly, so they do not stand the chance.
The story would be much more different if steem tokens would have been distributed much more evenly to the members of the community, then everything might just work. But i also understand that this is egg and chicken problem which happened early in the dawn of steemit and which was a necessary evil to kick start the things.
For now we are building our photography community, and thank to a very few steemians we got some delegated power to manually curate quality content and bring more people to steemit. We have brought in at least 100 authors of photographic content to steemit of extreme quality and there are many more that are awaiting for steemit account approval.
But if not for that delegated SP we got that pays them a few cents for their uploads we that would totally make no sense to post on steemit and they would rather continue sharing their content on BeScouted for free than be humiliated seeing hundreds of dollars of rewards on blurry photos that have been lousily snapped with with a cellphone in the dark. I might be exaggerating here a bit but you all get the idea.
I really appreciate the idea of what you are doing, i find it very noble and important. Bur i am afraid steemit as it is now is doomed as an application. Steem blockchain may thrive once SMT's come out, and many amazing apps will be built running on those SMT's, but steemit itself.. i have very big doubts it will hold water when it encounters competition.
Sorry for such a long comment that probably nobody will read, i just had to let it out. If i made a separate post it would have even less attention, and no whale would have a chance to read it at all i'm afraid.
let me know if i can do anything to help. As i would cry to see Steemit fail. The concept looked really promising.
I totally agree with your opinion. Steem members should spend more time on the steemit.
Hey @acidyo, this post you made, and the happenings around @berniesanders has spurred me to spend the time to put down my thoughts on the matter and to diagnose the problem of which you have outlined here.
I mention you in the post as well, maybe have a look?
Growing Unhappiness with Upvote Bots on Steemit
Proposal for New 'Promoted' Function
Great idea sir! Thanks for information!
@acidyo Always doing Good to improve the STEEMIT Community my hat is off to you !
This new projects warms a little minnow's heart, thank you so very much for this! Have been super excited waking up here in South Africa and seeing something I posted the night before with a nice boost thanks to the @ocd, @curie or other curators. It can be so disheartening when you've tried your utmost to write good content and find it's been read by hardly anyone and then see someone posting a pic of the ceiling and that earns him/ her a ton! That is so disrespectful to the platform! I understand they must have worked hard in the beginning to get so many followers, but really, some of the stuff makes a mockery of steemit. Excuse the ranting....but at least there now is another lifeline in the minnow pool with your new project, so awesome, thank you @acidyo :)
WOW... nice initiative for the community
up vote from me :)
I believe it will cause more damage in the long run also. You get some users with quite frankly appalling quality posts using many different boosters to punt their posts up to 10/20 dollars in value. It doesn't sound like an issue until you consider that hundred or thousands of these are effectively taking money from the reward pool that they would never have received based on the quality of their posts.
You are right too, you have to put in a bit of graft to build your followers and community to a point where people are voting for you and you are not just buying it.
I like the idea of the OCD not!
good
Good idea
good job @acidyo
this is a great deal...all in one post. I'm really grateful for the information. Im going to save this page for offline reading right now.
Absolutely great...It's really useful for big voters to contribute rewards separate comprehensive users.
Great info and great idea @acidyo.
Thank you for sharing it's Awesome idea
This is a great, encompassing post. It definitely beats fallacy, it operates on the realm of reality and perfect design for hunanity.
Yes, buying vote is of course a good way to draw some attention for new users( if they could manage to pay). But the main problem I am seeing here is, those so called big accounts are using those upvote bots with nonsense posts and draining the reward pools rather than helping new comers( as they always says helping to others but in reality..)
All fakeries
Hopefully, this will solve soon,
A consortium that is very important to maintain the popularity of steemit, in this case the role of OCD looks so maximal with personal curator-reliable curator and work independently according to the category of stories, writings and other posts, in the future @acidyo as a admin on this project may have to add more curators, along with Steemit development is increasingly in demand with more and more diverse users, so that the topic of writing, stories and other posts will also be more diverse as well.
Good job, best Regards
wahou.
Love The idea. I have already delegated few SP to @francosteemvotes (french curation team) and utopian.io.
I have also delegated for minnowbooster but your post makes me realize that is not a good idea. I'll prefer to delegate to ocd bot.
This means that there should not be instant gratification to earn rewards or become "famous". : True with this words ..
But, some times I use the bot to boost the important post that need more attention, like #sportsactivity challenge that need more user to join..
Btw, this post is nice sharing for steemit future. Two thumbs :))
A great project, I am so appreciate that you guy concerned about not to pay4vote. I am totally agree with good article is the long term development for steemit.
Also there is a loop of how to prove which one is a useful post by bot. Is it possible to selfcheck by the steemian? Ruled by youself, of cos will set up some checking group. I think it will use less the human resource.
Waiting for the ocd-bot!
The idea of having a list of authors that ocd will constantly vote on was similar to what I suggested in my previous post here : https://steemit.com/steemit/@guyverckw/official-minnow-support-bot
My post was to suggest Steemit setup such bot and you've done the same thing, which I think is definitely helping Steemit. How long will those authors be supported by ocd?
Another bot to vote based on the reversed idea of busy.org is good because those with high SP followers should have already getting decent votes from their followers, busy.org basically is trying to get more curation reward than helping the authors to develop. So your new bot should help the group of steemians who really need support. Well done!
Good post !!! Good luck....
Congratulations on the new project and all the help you give to this community. more and more people should follow your example. Have a nice day!
I do appreciate your effort in this, helping new Steemians (like me). And I agree that those paid curation services are somehow distorted the original purpose or vision of Steemit. I am a bit pessimistic on this, as in people will continue to try paying to boost their posts, and do not really care about the quality of their content. Frankly, most of us are normal people, and it is not easy for every of us to write content with high quality every time. Out of thousands of people, only a few of them can become famous writers (or photographers, or poets, etc.) But since people can buy Steem and power up, many people will try to make use of this to earn money, and distracted from focusing on good contents. They will somehow create some posts, and let those services to upvote regardless the quality.
Anyway, I no longer treat Steemit as a profit-making platform. I am trying to treat it as another social media channel that I will share my thoughts and life, like other social media sites such as Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I know I will not be able to create high quality content in every of my posts, and most likely only a few of my posts will be interested by fellow Steemians and gain their upvotes. Being too focus on the number of upvotes and reward received is not an effective use of one's time...
Keep the good work up, @acidyo! Fully support your vision and this OCD project.
I like the promoted function as first because it can help us promote while help burning coin and increase reward pool. But unfortunately as time goes by, the promotion tab didnt really help promoting and end up there is no motivation to use that further. I am sure it has alot room to improve to achieve the objective.
I think it's a great idea. Can't wait! Would love to help.
I will be fully support ,its a good idea sir @acidyo
This is a great vision, and I am glad that you will make it happen.
Thanks for sharing ...