I've never found a good explanation of the 30 minute rule, and when I first found out about it I thought it was pretty dumb.
I've thought about it a lot, and now I'm pretty convinced that this rule is actually extremely important. Here's the practical effect of this rule: it incentivizes people to go find unpopular content. The 30 minute rule guarantees that essentially nobody gets any curation reward for voting for @charlieshrem or @dollarvigilante, as you've discovered. However, the curation rewards for posts like these can be surprisingly high:
- https://steemit.com/steemit/@kristylynn/my-full-experience-with-blockchain-and-cryptocurrency-as-a-newbie-where-to-now
- https://steemit.com/travel/@oflyhigh/huilong-temple-original
- https://steemit.com/science/@stormblaze/why-love
- https://steemit.com/film/@marinauzelac/the-mind-games-in-films-of-michael-haneke-my-college-essay
The 30 minute rule is supposed to reallocate curation rewards away from popular content, and should disincentivize groupthink. One problem is that absolutely nobody has any idea how curation rewards actually work, so people still keep upvoting @charlieshrem thinking they'll get something for it.
ok that make sense
You know what? Im not even sure it does. Because popular content always gets a lot of money, 3% of $200 ( which is $6) is still better than 40% of $10 ( which is $4).
I really don't think reducing curation rewards when bots vote before 30 min is necessary to incentivizes people to find good unpopular content, the rule where if you upvote early you get more rewards is enough for people to focus on hidden unpopular content because that's where you will have the most chance to upvote first.
Now we end up in a situation where curators only receives 3% of the post's payout, that means people are disincentivize to participate in the system and to buy steem power.
Wouldn't a simple captcha get rid of the bots?
Since the voting takes place at the blockchain API level, this would not work. There were a lot of discussions about it when the platform was starting to take off, and the general consensus was that there were going to be people who used bots whether we want them to or not.
With this in mind, the best approach is to find a way that bots and humans can at least 'get along' and even potentially complement/benefit each other.
The overall response from @biophil is totally correct though. Good curators (ones that want to make money) need to find ways to innovate and detect quality undiscovered content before others do. With the 30 minute limit in place, it forces them to look for things that are not already 'popular'.
I don't think the point is to get rid of bots.
Manual curators can earn 20% annual returns on their SP; automated curators can earn over 50%. Those are decently large numbers.
True. But $6 is a lot less than the $50 it would be otherwise. It all comes down to a philosophy of what curation rewards should do. The devs feel that curation rewards should favor exploration, and I tend to agree. Ask yourself this: why should people who vote for @charlieshrem get anything? Everybody knows that his posts are going to be popular, so it's a waste of money to pay people to "find his posts."
But that's just one philosophy, and the reason I adhere to it.
What do you think about authors deciding how much they want to give to curators?
I've always thought that was a good idea: https://steemit.com/steem/@biophil/proposal-let-content-creators-commit-a-portion-of-their-authorship-reward-to-curators
The problem is that decreasing rewards on popular post doesn't achieve the intended effect, people still upvote these posts and these post are still getting the bulk of the money. So now we end up with an even bigger problem which is that curation rewards are extremely low on the platform.
If devs want to favor exploration , letting authors decide how much they give to curators is the best way to do it imo.
It's true. I've always been disappointed that the website gives absolutely no feedback to voters about how curation rewards work, so incentives only do something for people with the time and expertise to dig into the source code.
I see you are third in this list http://steemwhales.com/trending/?p=1&d=30&s=cr
Is this a list of the best curators? how are best curators calculated? how is curation score made? are you using a bot?
It's a list of the most profitable curators, normalized by SP. I think the curation score is calculated by this formula:
(curation rewards earned in past X days) / (steem power).So if you look on the 7-day list, the top three are currently @laonie (a whale), @biophil (a dolphin), and @philipnbrown (a minnow). They each curate at about the same efficiency, even though their SP amounts are vastly different.
Yes, I do run a bot. If you look through my account's voting history, you'll see that my bot never votes for popular posts - it specifically searches for posts that might have high rewards, but haven't received many votes yet.
If you'd like, you can send me your Posting Key and I can add you to my bot so you can rise up on the list of best curators as well. :)
Do you have an email address where I can send you my posting key? Thank you
Got your key, added it to my bot, and it all worked. You've already cast a vote or two. Results not guaranteed! :)
Yeah, you can grab my scraping-resistant email address here: http://www.ece.ucsb.edu/~pnbrown/
I have sent you an email with my key.
Let me know if you have it.
Thx