Introduction
I don't normally like posting about internal Steemit matters but I think this is an important issue that has been a problem since the very start.
One of the central problems with Steemit is that of curation.
It seems everyone wants to write articles and create posts but few people want to read them, let alone actively curate content.
We have a fundamental economic problem here - there are too many producers and not enough "real" consumers.
Further there is an even greater scarcity of one of the most important types of consumers i.e. the active curator.
In my opinion, high quality active curation is of equal importance to good quality writing and content production.
They are two sides of the same equation.
We need to have good content rise to the top - or at the very least to do better than spam.
Everyone is time starved and if we want to attract more readers to consume the content they need to be able to find it.
Sadly it seems there is little incentive to carry out actual active curation.
Why is this?
1)Real curation requires a lot of work and effort.
You have to search through huge amounts of crap and spam to find the odd gem. This can take hours of work and it is not guaranteed you will find anything truly valuable. You are searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack and it requires a lot of effort. So people stop bothering, they vote either randomly or tactically, neither of which involves what most people would consider true curation. I think we have all fallen into this trap and to be honest it is to be expected as the current economic system encourages it.
2)The reverse auction system actually rewards the using of bots.
This has been discussed many times before. The reverse auction was created to discourage bots claiming the majority of rewards by immediately voting on new posts. However it may actually disincentivise people voting manually. The cognitive load of calculating whether you should vote or not based on the timing is an extra hassle for people.
3)There is little reward in curation unless you have a massive stake.
Unless you have a whale level account there is little to be gained from actual curation. Further if you are a whale it doesn't really matter if you curate or not since you vote will likely be large enough to create a bandwagon/swarming effect on a particular post. If you vote for anything often enough others will notice and you will become a "good curator".
This is not because you chose good content, but because others will follow after your vote in an attempt to gain curation rewards.
One solution might be if you are a good curator you should buy a massive stake and that way you will profit from it.
This would work if all good curators had the money to put behind and back their curation efforts but just because you have a lot of money does not make you a good curator.
The Albert Einstein of curators may be out there but without the financial means to be a whale there would be little incentive for him to use his talents on Steemit.
Further as I mention above if you are a whale you can make any content become successful due to the bandwagon effect, so why would you bother to work to find good content when you don't have to?
In fact you may still be better of spending your time writing posts rather than actively curating. So we go back to the lack of incentive to curate versus writing.
4)Only 25% of post rewards go to curators.
I'm not sure how much actual difference it would make if there was a 50:50 split, but the current breakdown only serves to emphasise the greater value that is placed on writers vs. curators.
Whether the actual financial difference is big or small, the psychological signal it sends out is that curators are not as important as content creators.
There are also likely other issues that disincentivise manual curation that I haven't even thought of.
What is the solution?
I would love to say I have some kind of ingenious solution to these issues but I don't.
If it were that simple to find an answer it would already have been implemented. That is not to say that we should not try.
Here are some possibilities for consideration:
Switch back to 50:50 rewards for curation.
Remove the self-vote option for posts - or remove curation rewards from self-upvotes. Yes people could game it but why incentivise them to do it?
Look at extra rewards for top curators. The question is where would they come from - perhaps they could come from the extra 20th witness that was created by the removal of mining. I think it is worth looking at. Curation could be considered mining good content.
These are just a few things to think about and likely have multiple problems that will need to be refined. Even then they may not work.
As has been emphasised many times before Steemit is still a work in progress and we need to test out and iterate things to find out what works best.
Avoiding change paralysis and the problem fixation trap
It should also be considered that there may not be "perfect" answers that solve the situation, but there may be adjustments that make the situation better overall if they are put into practice.
Real life and human interactions are not fixed, ordered systems like computer code and I think it is often a mistake to treat them as if they were.
This is particularly so on a platform like Steemit/Steem.
One of the big problems I have seen whenever a platform change is suggested is that some people will negate it by highlighting problems.
This makes sense if it refines the solution, however all too often a particular solution is shot down and further discussion closed.
Either the solution is "perfect" or it cannot be used.
I would call this "problem fixation" and it can lead to a form of paralysis because in many cases it does not take account of the magnitude of the solution in comparison to the actual initial problem. People become so fixated on the negatives that they lose sight of the potential gain.
Just because a potential solution could be gamed by bad actors does not mean it will be. Further even if it is one must consider how many people will do it and the real world impact.
A small negative effect is acceptable if the overall gain is larger in magnitude.
For example it would not make sense to take a medication with dangerous side effects to cure a minor illness.
On the other hand if you had terminal cancer you would probably tolerate much more serious side effects because the potential gain (saving your life) would outweigh those negatives.
The real world is often like this. It is a balance of risks and rewards with few "clean" solutions that solve everything.
If we just abandoned every potential solution the moment we found a problem with it we would never make any progress.
Anyway, these are my thoughts on the situation. I think with we should keep exploring ways to improve the platform and discussion is an important part of that.
Thank you for reading
As an active curator that most of the time strives to vote on content I know will probably not see many votes after mine due to it being new users, etc. I have thought about this for a long time which changes would help out to incentivize curation more for all accounts involved.
Even though curation has a much bigger inventive here than say on other platforms such as Reddit it can still be finetuned more and I hope it will become better over time and experiments.
The curation penalty for voting early should be changed somewhat. I know this was put in place because of bots voting on the same second a post was released by authors they knew will gather a lot of votes but this was also done at a time when people were already using bots for their 40 daily votes. Now with only 10 daily votes and a bigger inventive to vote manually this could incentivize curators to check through the 'new' section more often in hopes of finding the gems that people don't already have on automatic bots.
Combined with that I think we need to rething the curve of rewarding curation where the first voters receive a much bigger piece of the pie than those voting last. I've noticed that often even if you are the last to vote you still make a decent amount of curation rewards if your stake is big, this would at the same time discourage curators from voting on friends and the popular authors if they notice it has already garnered big amount of rewards and they might consider voting on something newer or with less rewards instead.
At the same time, increasing the curation reward pool and decreasing the post reward one would activate more authors to start voting.
There are a lot of things that can still be improved on and experimented with and I'm sure we will be able to find a better balance over time.
I also noticed the lack of mention of delegation in your post, having read a post of @benjojo recently I have to admit that its like a superpower and in the right hands it will make curation even more effective on the platform.
I am for instance delegating my own SP further to the curators of @ocd and we are looking to growing over time in amount of curators and delegation with the platform and its userbase to make sure that less and less quality and new authors get overlooked.
Steem has a lot of incentives and even though not all of them are being used to their max extent yet I believe it will get better and better over time.
Sorry for possible typos, wrote this on my phone with a Swedish keyboard. :P
I agree with most of the points you made. In my opinion the real problem is with the content discovery. Since whales already have enough followers their posts generally gets upvoted if the content is good. The problem is with the content discovery for the new authors. Not many people are ready to spend time reading the posts of their friends and followers. They are constantly looking at the posts by whales so that they can upvote them in the hope of getting some curation rewards.
So we will need to turn the tables around give more rewards for the discovery of content by authors whose average earnings are low. Since whales with large number of followers already get enough votes and rewards, the curation rewards for discovering their content should be reduce. Adding curation rewards for resteeming can solve this problem to a certain extent. Remember that an upvote doesn't increase the visibility of a post, it only increases the rewards for the author of the post but it doesn't help in making the post reachable to others. If possible we should identify who are having a network effect in making content more popular and reward them accordingly. That will create a level playing field. Irrespective of whether you are a whale or a minnows you will be in the lookout for the good content and resteem them to make sure that it gets the visibility it deserves. Wildspark is already doing this successfully and may be steemit can learn from it.
If we don't address this problem Steemit will turn out to be like the Ghost cities of China where there are lot of high-end skyscrapers that have no occupancy at all. Just that in steemit there will be lot of users writing posts but not enough people reading them even if they are worthy. I hope Steemit addresses this problem by the earliest :)
Nice input! I like the idea of curation rewards for resteems!
Monkey Nuts
I had no idea that posts were not made more visible by upvoting them - I assumed that was part of the point of upvoting posts. I think most newbies to the site such as myself will assume it is a 'reddit' sort of situation where highly upvoted posts are more visible. Are the 'hot' and 'trending' posts not there based on upvotes, then?
I'm fairly new and still trying to wrap my head around all of this. My only reference is youtube where a like equals profit and a like on facebook acknowledges that I read the content.
I've been trying to raise my reputation and only voting while at 90% or better and my votes are still worthless. My posts are only bringing in less than 10 cents. I know it will get better with time.
I assumed that by voting for content that I enjoyed, that my vote would somehow propel the writer forward. I'm just plain confused.
I was thinking the same @ashley-ghastley.
Please read my post at https://steemit.com/steemit/@pjprivett/little-known-or-noticed-2
It deals with voting as a newbie, I'd be interested in your comments!
I will say it is a little surprising to hear some of the things you mention, and thank you for making that post so we can all be aware - however I'm sure there are reasons behind why these things have to be how they are. Your post is a little overly inflammatory - as in, it tends to be a little along the lines of "THE SKY IS FALLING!" whereas I'm sure there's lots of reasons for why these things work the way they do - if every new user could be super effective as soon as they signed up, then creating fake accounts and botting would be way too lucrative, and it ALREADY IS lucrative in some ways from what I've seen.
Thus although I DO wish there was a much more comprehensive guide to how Steem works for new users, I think many of these things exist for good reason and although it's frustrating, most of this stuff seems to come in time and be for the better, in the end.
Excellent response. I agree with everything you say.
Yes I think it needs adjustment.
Yes in fact people have suggested this before.
I forgot about delegation - that is one way to help I suppose this creates the whale issue again though. If you have substantial voting power does that reduce the need to actively curate? I suppose we would need data to assess this in practice.
It might reduce it if you become lazy and because of the rewards not changing too much cause of the curve, yes.
Since we also have the problems with distribution (not too many having a bigger stake to actively consider curation a way of earning), and although it over time is getting a lot better (and with new investors and curators coming to the platform its being spread wide even more) it could become a lot better if the delegation is spread among more curators and with the change in curation curve in mind it would work wonders for curators actually being rewarded a lot more for being the first to stumble upon great new and undervalued content.
Would also be nice if delegation could have more options for reward allocation so that inactive investors and whales would not need to rely on the curators sharing the curation rewards with them but it being done automatically instead thus incentivizing them to delegate more actively and to more users.
Yes in fact I think it was a big mistake not having this built in. Delegators should get something in return even if it isn't a 50:50 split they should still get something, as they are basically making an investment.
They shouldn't just be expected to do it as a charity service.
Exactly, especially since it only takes 10 votes daily now so any greedy investor will just throw em out quickly without care if its going to the right place or being distributed nicely instead of handing them over to a good manual curator knowing its doing a lot more good for the long term of the platform while still seeing some rewards from them.
you and @thecryptofiend raised so many good points
the sad part is no one up there seem to have even read this post
A lot of these changes have been / are being discussed. I was really in support of the idea of a delegator receiving a portion of the curation rewards that were earned from the delegated SP. It was discussed with the dev team, and unfortunately the math/computation to make it work was too complex. Something like that could be formed 'off chain' though via some type of delegation market. It is still early in the game. Something along these lines is still a possibility.
I completely agree. The way things are now, curators might be scared off by the penalty, which means they wait a few minutes to upvote a post. By then, the post is so far down the feed, never to be seen again, that the author misses out on a lot of eyes on their post. That's because people are more eager to check out a post with some upvotes already in place (though reputation plays a big role there too).
I think that's a really good point. It might help people who don't earn a lot with their posts to re-think their strategy and start upvoting more. Actually, maybe it would even get rid of some crap posts in our feed, because these people will be upvoting, instead of posting... Or is that wishful thinking?
"wrote this on my phone"
you deserve hazard pay
How do i uses the rewards to further my chances of making a little more. Any tips? And thanks for the guides on stuff
:)
Thanks a lot for the info I'm still trying to figure out how this whole steem thing works and this was very helpful
Is anyone aware of any accounts that do a daily best of summary. I think these have the potential to become very popular accounts but I am concerned that there is not much of an incentive to do the work. Maybe there could be a bonus for how the post was viewed? Whether it was found via your blog? Ie the more quality traffic a curator is able to send to a post the more rewards they receive as a curator? That would encourage community building....but once again, bots would probably be deployed in droves.
How much adderall do you have to take to comment 1 pagers
lol on the phone even xD
ATS token i.c.o offering free 75 tokens worth 10 $ , here is the link
https://steemit.com/ico/@kingjan/ico-for-authorship-com-tokens-is-open-for-investors
I have a reasonably large amount of SP and, though I'm capable of creating quality content and probably earning far more, have spent the last year or so mostly curating to try and help spread rewards.
Here's what I've found:
You need at least 200,000 SP to make curating worth your time, in the sense of earning a decent hourly wage (say, $25/hr). Which is why so few people are doing it
Curating + commenting + self upvoting your comments is the only way most people can justify the time spent curating
I find 5-7 posts each day that are valued at less than $5 and that I feel are deserving of more rewards. I write a comment, upvote my comment and upvote the post. As my upvote is worth about $5 I get paid about $15/hr to curate.... but I can only work about 1hr a day due to the SP drawdown. I have about 37k SP.
Now if STEEM would just hurry the hell up and go to about $5/$1Bn cap - which is where it should by by any valuation - we would see a whole different game. But the ironic thing is that Steem's success is the what is keeping the price down - people are actually making a living and selling Steem to cash out and the pay the bills. There is very little incentive at this point to power up, so more sellers than buyers.
I think we need to increase curation rewards in a way that cannot be gamed by bots.
Perhaps we have a timer. We know how many words per post and how long it takes the average human to read that many words. If the upvote is given before the timer expires the curation reward is far less than if the upvote is after the timer. Then we kill the bots and encourage people to actually read.
Then we go one step further and increase the curation reward if a comment is written. And the longer the comment the better the reward.
My $.02
Interesting. I suppose it is a paradox of sorts but at some point one would presume the situation would go viral and that would result in a rise in marketcap which would be sufficient to negate the cashing out. I think it happens with all (successful) cryptocurrencies.
thinking about it....
I manually curate, and haven't ever made a bot vote on this account.
I not only curate for good posts, but for good thoughtful comments.
Once you get away from the trending page, the comments are as scarce as the rewards.
The thing is, I don't make rewards by seeking out excellent minnows or voting on comments, which is fine, but I think it is part of the problem with how the curation rewards work.
I wish I had some solutions, but people are going to chase rewards, and I don't blame them a bit. ROI is a good thing and I know it is time for me to figure out how to use the site differently as well.
We could just ditch the trending and hot pages. Then people would have to sift through all the spam to get to the good stuff. That included those who want to game the system.
And keep the new posts page. Then we know where to find fresh content.
There is one other point that @scottsantens made: sometimes it takes more than a week for your post to be discovered. What if your post goes viral on the 8th day?
Most of those who have votes that matter at all are not sifting through anything. They setup their voting bots and make a few comments on their friend's posts.
So, basically, some people are treating, Steemit like a nepotism network, right?
Another question comes to mind then. How can one be objective about quality if they're voting on the work of a friend?
I'm not so sure that Steemit is looking to create that kind of reputation, but if enough people see that happening, they will see automated curation among a network of friends who are just passing the rewards between themselves.
I guess the word that comes to mind is "disappointment".
Thanks for clearing that up for me.
Exactly and this where the reverse auction perversely incentivises bot use.
It is easy to do that and also when you want to earn curation rewards using a bot you have to do it based on past success.
Yes very true.
[deleted -- decided to reply to parent comment]
Thats life!
True... and given that we're a decentralized structure, it strikes me as an open invitation to take a long hard look at structuring rewards as "tool" to guide how the site develops. In short "Put the carrots where you need the work to be done."
If course, that would require a lot of people to step OUTside their short term interests and instead look at big picture/long term benefits.
That is the hard part!
That's true
In short "Put the carrots where you need the work to be done."
^this.
I think this depends on your following a lot too, judging from what I've seen on some posts from people who joined my contest. There are some vibrant sub-communities here on Steemit.
I also get a couple of comments on every post I write, though ofcourse, it's hardly anything compared to Trending. That's mostly because posts on Trending simply get so many extra eyes on them, so it sparks a lot of discussion. I've noticed the same thing on most 'Steemit' tagged posts though. Mine never make anywhere near Trending/Hot rewards, but they get a huge amount of comments.
Yes! I try not to bother with timing too much and simply upvote when I read a post, but sometimes I catch myself thinking 'Hmm, maybe wait a minute or two...'. That's so wrong, because it takes away some visibility for the author. He/she needs all the votes he/she can get at the very start, when the post is still visible somewhere in someone's feed.
I also chase rewards sometimes, though most of the time, I try to be fair and upvote what I like. Either that, or upvote those people I appreciate here. Comments/posts alike.
Hello playfulfoodie, you do get excellent interaction on your posts, and because I look for comments to vote for I can attest that you are out there interacting in the community. I appreciate that.
Thank you @whatsup, that's a very kind thing of you to say :-)
Well, you do bring up a really important issue, here.
There are a lot of things about the original Steemit "intent" (as I interpret it) that I really appreciate.
I manually curate quite a bit-- but yes, it is time consuming. But I enjoy reading/interacting with quality content. This is a social platform to me, and I really like the "social" bits. So I curate both content and comments I feel are valuable or add something. The latter seems to be becoming rarer and rarer, sadly. I also really like the idea of Steemit being a sort of "gift economy" where the primary thing we do is "pay it forward." I like the idea that I can reward a content creator for something well done.
I DON'T like the whole "reverse auction" thing... and frankly, I just ignore it... probably to my detriment. When I have a response to a piece, it is NOW... I don't want to sit here and ponder "Oh, I wonder if my timing is right?" I don't like being under gun by a TIMER... sometimes I'm inspired to leave a 300-word comment... that takes TIME, and I don't want that to have an "opportunity cost" because now it will post "too late."
And that's another thing I DON'T like. The excessive reliance on automation and bots by many strikes me as counterproductive. Communities are built by PEOPLE, not by code, automation or bots. I'm not saying outlaw bots... but perhaps we can benefit from rethinking how they interact with the system. I know some bots are "human activated;" they retrieve a specific type of content for their operators who then curate manually... that's a great use of a bot. Others... seem like they only serve to add "dust" to the blockchain... a 0.3% bot upvote from an account with 3000SP? What IS that?
I am not a developer, but perhaps we can find a way that lifts-- not necessarily financially-- content that was "human upvoted/curated" as opposed to bot serviced to greater visibility, things might change. A sort of "This content was reviewed and approved by an actual HUMAN" stamp of approval as a mechanism to land something in "hot" or "trending."
One possible solution-- although I am not sure how to implement it-- would be the "gamification" of curation. Literally find a way to track and monitor what's being manually curated and have a "What people are reading" category next to "hot" and "trending" that is generated (again, I am NOT a developer!) by some weighted-average-algorithm that looks at manual curation and the SP behind that and comments being made and so on... a sort of "this is the best content if there were no bots" list. Just throwing it out there as a brainstorming topic...
Edited to add: To wit, this comment was probably added "too late" and I found this post "too late" (and that's not a complaint, just an observation) and as a content curator all I really care about is "is this content WORTHY?" not damn timers and clocks. Either the content is "good" or it's "not good." That worthiness doesn't increase or decrease with time. And that's where the curation system has "issues."
Great points not much to add really.
True and that is usually how I vote when I vote manually.
I ignore the "reverse auction" for the most part as well. From my understanding- the portion that you miss out on will be rewarded to the author instead. What a perfect way to give people a more rewarding upvote when my sp is so low!
This post received a 3.8% upvote from @randowhale thanks to @thecryptofiend! For more information, click here!
I think what we need is to develop some type of system where we can use the wisdom of the crowd to identify quality posts / gems, and provide the information to the larger stakeholders so that they can review/upvote it.
The challenge is how to do this in a way that doesn't spam the stakeholders with non-quality posts.
I think that if there was an efficient way to provide the stakeholders with a list of actual quality posts, that many of them would happily vote for them. Changes to the actual platform may not be needed.
Yes although in some sense this is what is supposed to happen already, with the quality posts rising to the top. I think some of the curation guilds were also trying to achieve this but they also have some inherent problems. One alternative would be to have paid curators who only curate and don't actually post - not sure how you could guarantee that or indeed fund it.
I agree that it is how it is supposed to work, but the inherent problems outlined in your post are preventing it from working as designed. "The crowd" does not have enough SP to make any difference with post ranking, even if they find quality posts. Most of the stakeholders who can make a difference do not have the time to filter though all the content.
Those suggestions may work. I think we need to continue brainstorming on ways to channel the wisdom/efforts of the crowd into effective curation.
@timcliff & @thecryptofiend, I think we're starting to get somewhere, now... there might actually be a possible workaround that possibly could be modified to work here. Please indulge this quick "brain dump:"
Back "before God invented dirt" I was part of a content for rewards site named "epinions;" this was circa 1999-2000. User generated content; peer reviewed/curated. Pretty much the same issues we're facing here... after a while curation ended up being largely in the hands of a few hundred people who really "cared" about the site... NOT a viable system for sorting millions of posts. So an improved system was devised.
Now, my memory is a bit hazy, but here's the general gist: Using Steemit terminology, we would have a separate "curation reputation," earned literally as a result of interaction with content. It was simple-- you were either a "member" or a "bronze," "silver" or "gold" curator. Your curation status was independent of other activity... A gold curator could have 17 posts or 17,000 original posts. Anyway, the incentivizing part here was that your rank was basically a multiplier on your rewards... and (as I recall) there was also something built into it to where if you slacked off, you could lose rank as a curator.
I should add that the system was NOT "game proof;" there were always some people trying to beat the system, rather than use it. But it certainly DID get a lot more people involved in the "read and rate" process.
Now in the context of the Steemit ecosystem, a minnow could work his or her way to Gold curating level while still being a minnow from a posting perspective. Let's arbitrarily say that a "Gold" curator would have to read, vote and comment on at least 50 posts a day over a 30-day period to get there... and then maintain that to stay there. Which sort of addresses the issue of having both content creators and content consumers on Steemit. We could potentially attract people to Steemit who say "but I don't write," who could still earn viable rewards as curators. Mind you, for this to be financially viable, we'd probably need to go back to the 50/50 split.
As an additional wrinkle-- and look forward-- with "Communities" on Steemit becoming a reality down the road, the top curators in certain topics often ended up as "Community Managers" (which we may discover we need here), tasked with such things as recategorizing (in our case, re-tagging) content that was grossly miscategorized in attempts to falsely gain visibility... not sure how we'd do that here... maybe an authentic use for flags? These were completely voluntary (and unpaid) positions, but they rewarded indirectly because your name would be everywhere, leading to increased exposure to your content, hence increased rewards.
Again, I am NOT a developer, and NOT a blockchainiac... so I'm totally OK with you telling me to sit down and shut up! Just tossing it out there....
Edited to add: The reason I bring up this particular case is that of the 100s of attempts of "rewards for contents" epinions was the longest lived and most spam-resistant of all... I got my last royalty payment in 2014(!) before then owner eBay pulled the plug on paying contributors. 15 years is an eternity in "web years."
Really great ideas! I will have to think more about how this could be adopted to the blockchain technology, but it is a great place to start and gives lots of food for thought.
($171.00 PROMOTED POST GOT MY ATTENTION!)
"Put the carrots where you need the work to be done."
Does the [WALLET] [PERMISSIONS] [POSTING] in each Steemit account ONLY allow voting and resteeming capabilities without sacrificing Active and Owner keys that would give FULL access to that person who lets say was TEMPORARILY working on a shift to help CURRATE for 24hours or possibly weekly?
Given that person would get a pecentage of the rewards for the work and time and effort after his or her shift was finished and curation rewards paid out MANUALLY or AUTOMATICALLY.
TL;DR
Cuaration/Curator Position (FULL TIME or PART TIME)
Freelance Temporary with possibility of handling the Rented or Delegated Steemit Account after say 3-6months of Curration Performance.
Any wrong doing or misuse of this Rented/Delegated account would have the Permissions revoked or changed. (The posting key is used for posting and voting. It should be different from the active and owner keys.)
The posting key would give the ability to vote (curate), post, comment, and resteem without access to the account's funds. Giving the user delegated SP and asking for a cut would accomplish basically the same thing. smooth used to hire curators back in the day btw - pretty much exactly what you described.
I suppose the question is, if such a system works most of the time does it matter? By trying to only find solutions that are 100% game proof we may end up with generally subpar systems in reality.
Further if such a system were found I am almost certain some person somewhere would figure out a means to exploit it
Bad human behaviour can never be completely eliminated. All you can do is try to mitigate against it where you can but it isn't always possible.
This is the difference between how many people who work in computing think vs what we see in biological systems.
Biological systems work optimally most of the time and in most situations, whether they work in exceptional circumstances or not is somewhat irrelevant.
I'm not saying we should ignore potential problems or risks only that we should not lose sight of what is important and the vast bulk of common circumstances, merely to mitigate against exceptions.
From where I am sitting, "mostly works" is a LOT better than "sometimes works."
Perfect solutions seldom exist outside of intellectual think tanks.
Exactly. Yet it seems some people are stuck in this form of thought.
I see examples with this solution every day. There are curation guilds, trails, and groups of people who compile lists of quality content. It serves a purpose, is thoughtful and rewarding.
The problem arises where these people are paid to present someone elses content while the original author receives minimal rewards. No doubt due to similar reasons that you've outlined.
Another function that could fill this roll is resteeming. The issue here is that it's not rewarding at all and can be misused without even realizing it. (at least in the minds of your audience)
I think there are indeed better solutions and we should keep thinking to see what we can come up with that is fair, rewarding and effective.
Exactly. Thanks for you wise words mate. I'm just glad that there are people in the community like you who understand such issues and are thinking about it too. I am confident that it is a problem which we will find better solutions to through such discussion and probably some degree of experimentation. This is one of the reasons I find behavioural economics so fascinating - things don't always work out as expected and incentives are not always a simple thing.
@timcliff I described a filtering system that can allow us to do that and help curators a great deal. If you are interested: https://steemit.com/steemit/@borislavzlatanov/proposal-make-it-easier-to-find-quality-posts-on-steemit
@thecryptofiend I think my proposal addresses a lot of the problems you raised, too.
I would be happy to get some feedback because I currently don't know if people don't see my proposal as good or the post just doesn't get noticed amongst the flood of other posts.
Thanks for sharing I will give it a look when I have a moment. It is hard to get things seen in the sea of posts.
Would be honored to have you onboard
https://steemit.com/eos/@cyberspace/whitepaper-for-our-8-new-steem-projects-by-steemcentral-ml-a-new-steem-sub-platform-coincentral-and-cyberspace
It seems like an interesting project, but can you please explain what it has to do with our discussion on curation? The way it is randomly plugged as a reply to my comment kind of seems like spam.
The developer think tank has a dbase for centralizing these types of issues and solutions at http://developmentcenter.ml (linked in that article)
Cool, thanks!
I have a pretty good solution I think. Let people do what they want with their steem power:
By which I mean allow a 100% SP vote instead of a max 2% vote.
Kindof a jumbled mess of my thoughts now, I am working on cleaning this up and adding more arguments for it.
https://steemit.com/steem-ideas/@donaldtrumpfan/allow-a-100-sp-vote-the-best-voting-problem-solution
I don't think that would work. The slider already doesn't allow enough granularity and making it more sensitive to allow smaller gradations would make it even more fiddly to use. Interesting idea though - would be great if there were some way to test the effect like a pilot study assuming the granularity issue could be sorted out.
interesting post
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Thanks.
Thanks for posting
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Good information and point of view on things here. Resteemd
Thank you:)
All of these arguments have been made for a year. At some point those of us who: a) objected to a lot of these poorly-thought-out and overly-reactive changes from the start, and b) have repeatedly argued for reverting them, just give up and move on to spending our time where we can actually make difference (ie. other projects).
BTW, the current system is not 75:25 but more like 88:12 given the effect of the reverse auction. Returning to a true 50:50 system that meaningfully recognizes the essential and valuable role of curators would increase curation rewards by about 4x. That's a dramatic difference and would make curation a lot more worthwhile even for people without huge accounts.
Nice to hear from you mate!
Yes I know you have been arguing to fix some of these things since last year but nobody seems to listen.
Exactly and that is really important for the system to function correctly. The current imbalance (writing vs curation) means it is just not worth it for most people. So we have more and more people writing and fewer and fewer curating.
I don't see what the barrier is to at least trialling it.
Nice to hear from you too. Hope you are doing well.
Yes just very busy - I suspect you are the same!
The one thing I noticed about the fallout from Hardfork 18 was that the minnows with sliders on their vote button, grew very conservative and rarely voted at 100%. After the first few days of abnormally high payouts, my rewards substantially dropped - now, if a whale or dolphin doesn't vote for me, I'm back to getting $2.00 per post regardless of content or quality. Also, if some of my followers do not auto-vote, but vote manually and delay or overlook me, it's even worse. If a post isn't up-voted within an hour, it's usually a lost cause - after 4 hours, forgeddaboutit. Rarely, does much happen in terms of rewards after the first day
I've noticed the same trend @johnjgeddes. On the other hand... I read and comment on a lot of content (including comments) in the course of a day, and my objective is to burn no more voting power in a given day than I can come back the following morning and start over with at least 95% power. In a sense, I like the current structure because if I see something truly amazing I can give it 100%, but if it's just average-to-good it'll get 15-30% and that still makes it feasible for me to look at 50-60 pieces per day.
Which isn't to say that there's aren't a bunch of people out there who aren't just outright fearful of "voting too much" so they sway in the opposite direction.
I would say that few of my posts move significantly after the first 24 hours... but before that they can; perhaps the result of publishing at "odd hours" so I hit many different time zones.
Thanks, @denmarkguy - you made some good points - publishing at odd hours I can try so as to hit those other time zones but publishing at set times also so I don't lose my base. I like your rationale for allotting your voting power - I think I'll adopt that, but don't take it personally if I only vote 25% on one of your posts LOL!!
Yes. It also seems a lot less people are voting in general and I'm not sure why.
I don't have a lot of steem power, but as a level 65 rep, and experience on this platform, I curate in the way of comments, suggestions, and guidance.
Not always do you have to affect the reward pool to make someone feel better about the work they've done, or to correct some misbehavior by a new user who thinks they can game this system unnoticed.
I don't have a large roster of people I've curbed who started on the system and started copypasta posts, or blatant spam. But I can count at least 6 people, I, myself, got them to either change their ways or abandon their efforts when they were abusing the system.
Now imagine if those 6 people were to proliferate and continue... this place would be an even bigger mess.
If people would do similar things, of any scale, we'd all win. We don't need just me doing it, but hundreds more.
[not that I suggest I am the only one doing it. I'm just giving a conceptual example]
...so if you have significant steempower, yes, absolutely, please help curate both good and bad content by upvote/downvote.
...if you have little steempower but a good reputation, yes, absolutely, please help curate both good and bad content with simply words on people's blogs. It is quite effective.
..finally, join and seek out and support curation groups who do good work in this area. At least part of the time... even if it means delegating a tiny portion of your steempower to the cause [if you are technically able to figure out how to do it]
Thanks for this post and bringing even more awareness to this issue. Curation continues to be one of the challenges of this system.
There is absolutely no way to "code in" a perfect botted solution, or algorithm to do what humans must do...
Proper curation will always need human labor to be involved.
I think nothing will work unless curation reward is higher than self-voting reward.
Good point, but I'm not sure that will be possible from a mathematical standpoint.
Within 30 minutes, already 120 upvotes, and they are still pouring in by the minute...
like u rightly said, the power of the whale is immense on the steemit platform, the bandwagon effect it has is worth commendation
back to the topic of discussion
I have been following the myriads of problems steemit is faced with, and observing how blue whales, are doing their best to fight off the rampage caused by sharks and piranha fishes here on steemit... Once again the efforts are commendable. Without these self-styled heroes (i wont mention names today) our precious steemit as we are enjoying it now, would be in total disarray.
So what solutions can we proffer? First of all i will offer a way out of the headache, and this is from an excerpt of one of Jack Sparrow's movies, where one of the english soldiers trying to capture him, and being so amazed how he slipped out of their fingers said something like this "how does he do it? Does he have it all planned out, or does he make it up as he goes along?"
The movie makes us believe he makes it up as he goes along of course....
Relating that scene to our present steemit case scenario, i think the best way out is to observe trends, analyse metrics, and then build defenses, and make necessary adjustments as we go along, for the overall good of steemit, as these threats to the well being of steemit become more apparent...
On another note... Curation is an integral structure of steemit, which has been largely marginalised...
I am really happy i read your post, you just put in writing what i have been battling with in my mind for some weeks now, since i actively got back on the steemit platform.
one thing i know, is this, in the real world scenario, our governments are able to successfully fight of, or to an extent incapacitate worse threat cases than we are facing here on steemit, and even though the world still faces all kinds of unfriendly, hostile activities, the world has not come to a grind or halt, we have learnt to make do with the good and the bad together in society....
steemit is another 2nd life society or world, if it can be done in the real world, i dont see what makes steemit any different.
When forces of evil are on a rampage, there are always forces of good that will rise to combat and repel them back... We also have that here in steemit
Since issues with curating so far have been identified, lets keep observing, anlyzing and making recommendations, as you have so well done and i know very soon, a viable solution will crop up... That will stem this tide of curation injustice.
Brainstorming
(i) Make it into a competitive game? Whales could sponsor and reward "curation contests" among individual or teams of curators, using their own preferred metrics for what it means to be a good curator. Someone could even make a "fantasy curators" game, modeled after fantasy sports leagues.
(ii) Modify rewards to let authors, instead of directing shares of rewards to a designated account, delegate a share of rewards to whatever curators vote on the post.
(iii) Consider redoing the payout algorithm to use something like a second price auction for determining rewards (Google found this style of auction to be more appropriate for their digital advertising sales. It tends to encourage bidding to stay more in line with perceived value.)
(iv) As @sigmajin suggested quite some time ago, put reverse auction penalties back into the curation rewards pool instead of giving them to the author.
Great ideas. I like the idea of creating a game. Delegation of rewards is also a good idea. Second price auction is interesting too.
Delegation of rewards to a post's voters might be vulnerable to abuse, but I think it's more transparent and lower friction than the various post-boosting bots that are emerging. I have thought for a while that authors should be able to customize the percentage of curation rewards on their posts, so that would be a way to accomplish it.
.
Please stop spamming the comments here and delete the duplicates - you are likely to end up with flags.
Ok. Your call. How else to make people aware? The idea is to collect all good ideas for developing the Steem platform in one dbase. As it is now everything is splayed out in comments across many articles. You really see it as spam?
I'm not sure but posting it under each comment will just annoy people.
Exactly !
I was just going to flag it.
I know this is an expired post, but I just wanted to say that this is the primary reason I pretty much only post my photography now. In fact I consider it to be pretty brave these days to write a post like this one, @thecryptofiend, because as soon as people see how long it is, many of them likely immediately roll their eyes and move on. Photos are quick and easy to digest, though, and I've found that if I have a handful of daily projects, it gives me new content to post every day.
Yes it is sad.
Ok, there's a lot of comments here already, and this one will probably just get lost in the din, but did anybody mention @the-traveler's ideas about content curation? I think it would solve some problems if more curators were doing something like this.
It also helps generate more revenue for the curator as they get upvotes from their curation posts.
Thanks for sharing. There are some good ideas there.
You can add this issue and solutions to our new Innovation dbase at http://Developmentcenter.ml at SteemCentral
https://steemit.com/eos/@cyberspace/whitepaper-for-our-8-new-steem-projects-by-steemcentral-ml-a-new-steem-sub-platform-coincentral-and-cyberspace
Thanks I'm not familiar with it. Will need to take a look.
It might not be an easy fix but I think if a few of the bigger curators were to start doing weekly curation blogs like that more people would get on board. I know it doesn't really address all the issues regarding finding and rewarding quality curators and content but it could be a step in the right direction.
hm i was considering buying steem to give more visibility to my posts, but if you want to remove self-vote then this incentive to buy steem disappears...and the whole attention economy collapses.
even if you increase the curator rewards (could be a good idea) very few will buy steem to be curators as very few have time for it.
also self-vote will still be done by proxy bots.
as long as people self-vote genuine posts that took time to write I don't see a problem (they paid by buying steem to get the attention) but it's another matter when they automate self votes towards spam bots.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@simoneighties/welcome-bot-proxy-self-vote-abuse-in-introduceyourself
this is clear abuse yet nothing is being done about it .
In any case the Steemit team needs to define the rules of the game once and for all, or it is difficult for Investors to enter the market without knowing exactly what steem can be used for. there's an hardfork around the corner every month with rule changes and the investor never knows where he stands . And without the investor this platform dies. The investor is never mentioned in these discussions. yet its the most important aspect in keeping Steem alive
my personal feed is where i find the information i'm interested in, while I know the trending page will always be dominated by capital (i rarely look at it, and when i do just to see how much ppl are making)
by increasing curation rewards maybe better content will make the trending page, but i wouldn't count on it. worth a try though.
Very good point. It is certainly something that needs to be considered however if you read further I suggested an alternative would be to exclude curation rewards for self voting.
As for the numerous people abusing the system I agree something needs to be done about it but there is no simple solution just as with this issue.
yeah removing the curation rewards would be fair, but I don't think it can be done. The user can simply delegate or move his steem power to a proxy and self vote with the added curation rewards that way.
He/she could but it would be better than what we have now. Not everyone would do it and more of the curation would go to other people.
I think that is a pretty good problem which we experience the most. Despite the fact I do post sometimes it is hard to find consumers and curators. I don't know if that is because after HF 19 people have been reserving their upvote due to voting power or because of the numbers of users joining creating content and ultimately creating this flood of posts.
It seems like here on steemit if you spam you do better than me. I don't envy these people but I've seen people who are small and post purely memes and earn a couple hundred dollars a week. I understand why they would do well as it is a social media platform and no one wants to bored with lectures and essays leaving good content to dwindle while the rewards pool is reaped by this spam.
I try to look through the new section finding good content and upvoting them. For the platform to thrive, rise and prosper we need to work as a community and help each other grow.
Maybe we could get rid of self upvoting as well as integrated a system where relative to how much you curate, you reach different levels which allow you to earn more and more of the curation stake.
Let's hope some of these suggestions and answers are taken forward to enhance and promote curations which the site needs to thrive @thecryptofiend
Absolutely.
Now that I have comfortably read all the comments and joined in the ones I could relate to, I will now leave my comment.
The truth about manual curation is that it is time consuming (speaking from experience) and most people simply want to avoid the stress of added responsibilities hence the bots have to do it all, but the reliance of bots/autovotes have made certain individuals lazy to actually curate posts.
An example is when someone is on a fixed percentage of autovotes from whales, the person's contents might not be carefully evaluated and yet will be given "free" votes. To such a whale, he is curating, so when people shout for votes,`he feels o well, I am voting a couple of people so I am not selfish.
Now the downside is some might put a good author on autovote, but on something like 1% because of the reputation score of the author. Such a person no matter how well he/she writes has been condemned to a fixed vote and has to compensate by messaging people and practically asking for the votes which might/might not amount to something.
The voting system is filled with so many complications like timing and all that deserving posts get missed.
Now if we say let us employ the services of manual curators who won't post but vote, I will tell you what will happen, the curator's friends and favorites will end up getting more votes plus the numerous alts of the curators will be enriched.
The truth is this is more of a structural/organizational problem than a logical one, because for everyone plan made to reward authors, the current system of voting/rewards creates more issues why there will be more complications.
Solution
The top members should really sit down and answer this question: Is steemit a money making Cow or a vision? If it is the second, then certain things need to be reviewed like the voting/reward system which favors just a few and neglects the many.
More people should be groomed and raised to at least Dolphin like level to match the amount of exist minnows and red fish. That way it becomes a system of helping each other grow because the only a few receiving good rewards with decent SP actually take time out to also reward authors. Some are concerned with making and powering down only.
This brings me to my third point. The power down mechanism could be a tool for curation. A system where each powerdown is only successful if you have attained a certain level of curation and engagement in the community (I don't know how that will happen but it sounds good).
Think of it as locked SP that can only be unlocked with curation and engagement.
A buddy system where whales and Dolphins with a decent SP are encouraged to delegate to 5 apprentices and the apprentices must vote a specific amount of people daily. The donor can then channel his attention elsewhere and curate more...
My two cents tho
Edit: That being said, I resteemed and upvoted this because you spoke my mind.
I hope that something changes here as neither authors, nor curators receive any real return on their efforts for many weeks or more after starting.
I myself have worked day and night posting, curating and commenting, and only continue because I have high hopes for my future on this platform.
But this is very similar to my experience as an artist in meatworld in general, if you are not running with the in crowd, you will not be the in crowd ever.
And in steemit the fact that your work is basically negated seven days after you post...
makes a mockery of the time a newbie can put into a post, similar to the way that selling an artwork makes a mockery of the time spent creating said thing.
Yesterday I sold an artwork in the real world, out there in meat world. It was part of an exhibition of pictures that I worked on for around six months, full time. I then invested 500 euros in frames (cheap although reasonable frames is all I can do these days) and 100 in fuel to deliver the artworks to the gallery, (in another province)
And the artwork in question started at 1200 euros, and I was asked if I would like to offer a discount price which I did at 1000 and then sold for eight hundred after a call making that offer.
and I have to be pleased.
And I am of course, but I would be pleased to sell my soul lately, the thing has gotten that way.
and only 400 of that is for me of course, 400 goes to the gallery.
so I still haven't broken even on the series, and that's working full time for free, as I do on steemit
lol
keep up the good fight
Wow thanks for sharing your experience. I suppose what your real world experience shows is how many extra costs and middlemen there are in the real "meat" world when it comes to selling content. The blockchain world is supposed to cut out a lot of those costs and it does but as Steem/Steemit show they have their own different problems which must also be solved.
You make some excellent points here. The balance of producers to consumers is indeed way off. I wish I had a solution but sadly I don't. I wonder if the situation would improve if it were easier to sort content. Not everyone is a "jack of all trades". I'd argue that most people prefer posts about a certain topic specific to their tastes. Clearly I love Star Wars. It would be cool if my feed could be filled with all the Star Wars posts for the day. I know I can search tags but it would be much easier if that were my home page. If we all had more personalized feeds, I wonder if people would actually read more.
Excellent points.
This is one of the reasons my feed is a nightmare - I follow a lot of people who post on various topics but only some of their posts are about something which I am interested in. If there were a more intelligent way of constructing the feed - perhaps as you suggest using tags and maybe even other ways to personalise it, it would make the job a lot easier.
This is currently the challenge here on this platform when we produce not just quality but unique content but are not getting seen because we are not paying users, or do not have that whale ability yet. Letting our precious 3-hour masterpiece get drowned in the abyss of new tab. Not for the money, but some people out there deserve to see our content too. We also come here to find like-minded individuals and the right people who will read. It's not their fault if they don't find us, it's just the system. Then the post will become old after 3 hours, just like that. But then we are judged and frowned upon if we use / invest in bots to push our posts / or as a temporary solution to the system. But why don't people frown at those whales who self-upvote or posting the same old topics being recyled everyday on the trending page? I agree with the solution - remove self-upvote. Use rep as a factor for curation and for pushing posts up.
I can see steemit is still in beta, but perhaps there might be other improvements or solutions that need to be done than just having the ability to change the cover photo? lol
Yes, some people gave up complaining as we want more solution here. Some are just in-denial, are here for the community or to showcase their talent. If that is what steemit is all about, then hide the $ sign that taints my fellow writers' mind. And add more features that cater to those who don't write for money such as blogger.com features, tags on our own feed for easy search, filter, custom views, archives, date search. These are more useful improvements than being able to change the cover photo.
Unless we post about positivity, success in life or in steemit, then we get auto upvoted by the whales, otherwise, be ignored if not. Good for those who have regular support, keep inspiring them with those topics so they can keep the money here! :) Unfortunately, some people don't write/live up to other people's expectations.
What's your take on this curation thing going on, rewarding /luring the very talented writers only at the beginning, then being abandoned later? We can't blame these talented new writers for being frustrated in the end when $300 at rep 25, becomes $0.06 at rep 57. Quality content then becomes a myth. Then people judge those who write for the rewards? And the suggestion of the mediocre is to leave the platform, or don't write for the money? Excuse me, we also have our wealth here, cannot be erased from the platform anymore, unlike those who can take their wealth back after 13 weeks.
Here's the good part most people here want to hear, now there are a few people staying for the community and not sacrificing the quality of content (old and new writers here despite losing the drug given to them). For the love of writing, and for the community. I'm staying because I have few readers who curate my content because they genuinely like or read what I create/produce. I appreciate the 0.03 cents, and the engagment. How's that for being positive. :)
Sorry about this, I should have turned this into a post lol. But I don't want to taint my travel memoirs portfolio with anything about steemit's internal matters anymore.
Meanwhile, I'll write away....
Great points. I think a lot of people probably stay on just for the writing!
Do you mean curation guilds? I think as more people join it becomes less and less feasible for them to vote for the old people so it is an inevitable result.
I be quite new and am just getting the "feel" of the steemian culture, which is currently evolving.
It just occured to me after reading through this post and comments that as bitcoin is proving to be the "gold standard".
It seems like a social media like steem is seeking to find a way to measure "quality" for a lack of a better word.
So it occured to me that just as we have Bitcoin as the standard of currency, perhaps the next step is Bit-Citizenship. Which is the direction the Steemit seems to be going and where many of the questions seem to leading.
Anyway to avoid being long winded boring, I will just throw out there the notion of the measure steem might be about is the idea of consuming less.
This is the opposite of the conquer and consume mentality which envelopes most current global cultures.
I am sure many here are thinking along similar lines.
As the concept of curation has us looking for a measuring device, but a device to measure less, not more.
Just some food for thought as this has got me thinking, I'm sure others are thinking similar ideas.
Cheers...
Interesting thoughts. It may well be that the reputation management and quality control aspect of Steemit is one of the most valuable aspects and it will be interesting to see how it evolves.
2)The reverse auction system actually rewards the using of bots.
This has been discussed many times before. The reverse auction was created to discourage bots claiming the majority of rewards by immediately voting on new posts. However it may actually disincentivise people voting manually. The cognitive load of calculating whether you should vote or not based on the timing is an extra hassle for people.
Even worse:
I log in, go to my feed, see a post I like!
"Shit... it's only 2 minutes old. I'll be denied any rewards if I vote on it now, I'll come back in a little bit and upvote it further down the auction. "
4 hours later:
Crap, I forgot to go back and upvote that post... ah well, no point now... too far down the voting pool to make my vote worth any of the rewards. Best to save it for something fresher.
Exactly:)
What's worse... SO MANY don't even know about or understand the reverse auction. Especially minnows. So there's a high chance they will be blowing their votes, seeing very little return, and just giving up on curation. Wrote a whole post on it, but I'm still fairly new and my exposure hasn't really grown. Glad to see others fighting the good fight and getting the message out, lol.
I think a lot of talk about it happened when it was implemented, and a lot of the people who have been around now just assume everyone knows about it since it was talked about THEN so much. I didn't find anything about it until well after a month of being here.
Having a full on "Here's how everything actually works!" page on the site itself would likely be a really good start.
Yes lack of understanding how everything works is a big problem.
Also, the ability to follow a category/tag as well as individuals.... would make new author exposure more likely.
I could go on and on with these ideas.... lol.
I think that will come with the communities feature which is supposed to be this year.
A very simple way to help make the reverse auction less problematic, is to distribute the forfeited curation rewards to the OTHER voters instead of the author.
Yes, in the end as long as the positives far outweigh the negatives then change is good. Nothing is ever 100% perfect, we should strive to get it closer to that target though.
I wish I had ideas on how to improve this dynamic, but it is well out of my technical realm too. I do my best to curate though. I start and end my day going through my feed manually, upvoting and commenting. It is quite time consuming though.
Dear @cryptofiend,
I agree with everything you write here, also it's so good to see how @acidyo reacts. I feel that indeed the author rewards compared to curation rewards is off balance. Let's compare two scenario's where you only have 50 SP:
Scenario 2 would add far more to the value of Steem as a platform, but Scenario 1 pays out 10 times more.
At the moment, bad behavior is rewarded, so that's exactly what we'll get. Whatever behavior is rewarded in the short term, that is exactly the behavior that we will see, it's only human nature. It seems that curation at the moment is only effective and rewarding for accounts that already have very large amounts of SP...
@blueorgy you must read this. It can refer to your recent post:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@blueorgy/what-needs-to-change-now-in-order-for-steemit-to-survive-partial-payout-declined-self-voting
@thecryptofiend
"The real world is often like this. It is a balance of risks and rewards with few "clean" solutions that solve everything"
Vaccines are great examples. Some of them have some certain very low probability side effects but the risks are so low that they come nowhere near to outweighing the enormous benefits from using vaccines.
Exactly. Thanks for the link I missed that post and will check it out.
Hi @logic, I see you have mentioned me.
This is automatic response so that I may respond to your mention later.
I agree with this and your whole post completely. We should always be working towards an outcome that is most favourable to as many as possible and content curation is equally as important as creation.
Good solutions provided to one of the many ongoing issues at the moment! :)
Have great day my friend!
Thank you:)
Agree with your possible solutions. You've identified the problem really well. Too much supply and too less demand. I think I should take some time off posting and focus more on curation. But at the level I am in right now, would it really help?
It all helps the community, I suppose the question is, is it worth your while and I can't really answer that.
Exactly. Its not like I am not learning many new things over here; from cryptocurrencies to cultural exchanges. But I think I've just had to skim too much and this problem is growing day by day.
Switch back to 50:50 rewards for curation.
Remove the self-vote option for posts - or remove curation rewards from self-upvotes. Yes people could game it but why incentivise them to do it?
The first point could be ok but then people will use always more bots and the earning will increase.
Second point... maybe limit the % of self voting if the % of curation will increase. For example self vote will take 5% of voting power and decrese the % of voting other account.
People will try hard to get more money as possible. The third point is not easy to put in place.
People use bots already. I think this will encourage a better balance between curation and posting.
That might discourage voting for others though.
Ok better clarify. I would love the idea of increase the % of curation reward at 50%. It would be great and believe me I am voting as well myself to increase my SP.
Regarding the 5% lost self voting means that ONLY if you vote yourself your vote power will drop down of 5%. Believe me if my voting power will drop 5% i will prefer read more posts than I usually do instead of voting my posts.
For the other part of the coin... we will have much more curators than writers and will be good or bad having only bots voting.
Ofr the other
it will be great as I am voting my posts as well but the majority of my VP is spent voting other people posts. would be amazing
Just this weekend I was asked if I wanted to curate for Curie. I've spend many hours wading through the crap and I still didn't find any post that fit all the requirements. Granted, Curie has many requirements (some I don't agree with, others I do), but it is an example of how right you are by pointing this out. It takes so much time to find good content when there is so much crap being posted.
I'm not sure how exactly we can rectify that situation. One thing that comes to mind is an option to sort by reputation. That, however, makes it very hard for newbies to get a foothold. Especially since everyone is so afraid to flag bad posts, so they'll be on the same rep level as cat picture spammers.
What is a 'top curator' in this scenario? Is it the person who uses most of their voting power/percentage (excluding on themselves)? Is it the person who upvotes posts with a combined highest rewards payout? I hope neither by the way. I'm not sure how to define a top curator. Someone who's serious about curation and actually upvotes good content, no matter what the potential payout/reward for themselves is, but how do you measure that?
I love your post and agree with it. Like you though, I have no clue how to make curation a more thankful job whilst remaining 'fair', or as fair as things can be.
That is a good question to ask. According to the current system it would be the person who upvotes posts with the highest combined payouts at the earliest stage.
I think you're right. This would most likely mean many bot votes for known authors who always earn a lot, so it wouldn't promote a system where new people (or anyone besides the lucky few on Trending) could thrive.
I totally vote manually and have explored many aspects of voting. After writing for many years, as a contributor here and there, I had thought with that background I would mostly write here on Steemit. It became more and more obvious that to do much of that I needed to "make friends" and get to know Steemians through common interests.
I have written a few short posts but I agree there are "tweeks" that could help the platform.
Having to time your vote in order to receive the best benefit is a "pain" as people are busy and using Steemit as social interaction and not their main job. ROI is noted as part of the Steem package when one joins and patience is a must as we work as a community to make adjustments for a more level playing field. It frustrates me that I cannot come up with immediate solutions. As the platform evolves I feel that they will appear in good time.
Yes I think it is a process of continuous evolution.
If we need more people with more power to make a difference with their curation votes, then maybe there could be a method by which Steem Power was given to certain curators via a lottery. The more you curate, the better chance you have at winning enough Steem Power to make a difference in voting rewards.
That's an interesting idea. I'm not sure how viable it would be but it is worth exploring.
Yeah. Not being able to program, I couldn't begin to imagine how you'd implement that sort of system, but variables could be brainstormed, like maybe you need a certain reputation score or a certain level of curator activity and then the software itself chooses someone out of a pool of similar users. I think it'd have to be a trustless system and baked into Steem to remove corruption.
I did not like it when I found out the rewards auction. If I see a piece of content I like, I want to upvote it right then and there.
When I started using Steemit, I browsed through the "New" feed a lot. But I had to go through so many spammy posts to find ones that I liked that I eventually I just stopped. Now I mainly stick to Hot and Trending. Reading this post though makes me want to go back to being a more active curator for the good of the community.
One thing I think could help would be creating "Publications" like there is on Medium. There could be some Steemit accounts dedicated to resteeming posts. The key is that authors who believe in their posts could send them to these Publications to be resteemed if they approve. That's the main way Medium solves the issue of putting unknown content in front of more readers and I think it would work here too. Of course, people could start spamming requests at the publications but, like you said, we shouldn't dismiss that solution because people might abuse it.
I think the stuff @sndbox is doing is pretty interesting. They're gathering a group of people tasked with finding interesting entrepreneurial content for them to resteem.
Also, I mentioned you @thecryptofiend in a recent post I wrote about the pros and cons of using a username vs. real name on Steemit
Actually the idea of publications is a really good one. In some respects I think the communities function may fulfill a similar role as people will be able to create their own communities (if I understand it correctly).
What's the communities function? Is it like Facebook groups?
To a degree - I heard it would be more like sub-reddits on Reddit - although we don't have much detail on it yet.
Hm, interesting. I thought tagging was supposed to be like that but I guess not because you can add multiple.
One simple desicion - restrict self-upvoting
I think the main problem is that it's quite hard to browse the site, in relation to reddit, etc. There needs to be more automatic curation before the user sees posts. I have to go through pages and pages just to find something that piques my curiosity to click. That makes curation time consuming and less fun.
Yes that is definitely an issue.
I'm new, is it possible to follow tags in a useful way?
Not yet. There are some tools like Steemwatch that allow it but it is not part of the site yet.
I think removing the self upvote option is a good start. I have done it, but its not really worth doing when you are a minnow anyway! when you are trying to get your posts seen but competing against self voting whales, we don't really stand a chance. It's a hard platform to progress on when you are starting out now
Steemit is at a critical point when spam and abuse are becoming a real issue. We need the community to decide what they want it to be. We have the power
Exactly.
This is truly a gem of a post, and I just couldn't agree more with you. Im kinda new in steemit (45 days), I join here because it looks fun and interesting to be part of. I love to write, I love photography, and here I found a place to mix both of them. I have some stories to tell, and try to make always 100% original content, I even try to post daily, in two languages. And after doing this, games one of the parts I enjoy the most, that is reading and try to learn more and more about what I'm interested. I start to read about crypto a couple of weeks ago, since I start "playing" on bittrex, and try to read as much as I can here on steemit. And as you said, a lot of people are writing and no one seems to be reading, and the problem is the big gap in between the potential profits as an author and as a curator. That only means that a lot of people are here because of their own interest, and just trying to make some profits from here, most of the people didn't want to read, or are too focused on the authors part. I don't have an idea to solve this problem, the self vote as you said should be forbidden, and also it could help that more people with high voting weight help the real readers to make their own vote worth more, it could level up the SP for some of the people who are actually willing to spend time finding and upvoting a good post.
Well delegation is a way to do that. The problem is currently delegation of SP doesn't earn the delegator anything at all - they just have to do it for free which is clearly ridiculous.
I actually like curating and I think for most people if they dont really see much in gains for doing it they wont, but then again in order to gain more in curation you need more SP and I think the problem is we dont have enough people with much SP yet. I think hopefully with time more people with SP will be available meaning others will have a chance to grow also and eventually also have enough SP so that their votes became more valuable. I myself wish I would get slightly more votes so I could vote and curate on others here more often but its a very slow process, I am maybe going to look into more someone willing to delicate but atleast I reached the 75k kings badge for curation not long ago.
I'm not convinced that using bots is the correct way to go on what is supposed to be a social network site
It certainly isn't ideal and I don't like doing it myself which is why I keep switching my bot off and on.
I just think you lose something taking the human element out , I like to vote for things I read and like. Thank you for taking the time to reply cheers
Is it possible to identify voting bots on the network? If so banning voting bots would make Steemit a much better experience. Comments and votes should only be real human interaction.
Bots should only be used as admin tools for stats and diagnostics.
I don't think there is any effective way to do it.
I think curation of tags could help also. This is when final tags set of every post is up to curators (all users). And the person whose set is most popular gets most curation reward and finalizes tags for a post. This solution is financial incentive for content structuring and categorizing.
That's a good idea.
finally, I'm super glad someone covered this problem. I've definitely been subconsciously thinking about it myself.
I have a potential partial solution for #Steemit - on the post listings, allow a preview of the post on the right side. For people with large monitors they can scroll through content, and hover over, read it and decide in an easier manner if it's valuable rather than having to open a new tab, read, decide, go back, or scroll and vote
Interesting idea.
My post earnings is actually in the crapper if not from a support and mercy from friends like you and I believe some serious steps like incentivizing curators a little more to encourage them and a check valve for self votes too can make a big difference.
Problems in steemit is too noticeable.
Excellent Post. Your article and heart for the platform of Steemit made me want to go back to trying and taking the time to curate good content. Your suggestion of "Curation could be considered mining good content" is very intriguing to me. It would be awesome to spend time on being a mining curator. Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts on curation's role on the Steemit site.
Thanks:)
One problem you mention on top, there are not enough readers. Interesting constellation, normally it is the opposite.
I believe knowledge about Steemit is still very limited, and entrance barriers e.g. registration are way to high to attract a broader audience. These have to resolved first.
Hope that could be done soon.
Yes me too.