@ocdb's mission has always been to support great content creators on Steem and we have pursued this mission through the bear market even as our task was made more difficult by users flocking to bid bots to maximize ROI. To continue supporting great content creators, we responded by creating a non-profit, high-return bidbot with a whitelist of proven creators. But we're excited to announce a major change in how OCD operates as a result of #newsteem.
TL;DR
- #newsteem is here and it's working
- In response to the early results of #newsteem we are switching back to manual curators!
- We are once again rewarding non-whitelisted users including users on sites like Reddit and Twitter
- We are implementing a for-profit model
- Profits from fees will be reinvested into Steem to grow the user base
- Curators will use profits to tip STEEM on Reddit and Twitter
- We will remain one of the most profitable curation projects for delegators
If you haven't noticed, #newsteem is here.
Thanks to the EIP, abusive behavior is now being dealt with. Active stake and eyeballs are again returning to the Steem ecosystem on the hunt for quality content. One consequence of this is that we can return to our original mission to actively search for and reward as many deserving users as we can. Yep, OCDB is going manual and this is why:
- Manual curators enhance Proof-of-Brain
- Accelerate the changes in behavior that the EIP encourages
- Improve manual curation or delegating to curation initiatives
- Reward valuable content creators
Because @ocdb offered the best returns for delegators and provided the most profitable votes to whitelisted users, we believe it could have survived any market. But one of the things that makes @ocdb special is that we have always put the long-term success of the platform, and userbase over profits and return-on-investment.
Whitelist Applicants
If you have applied to the whitelist, don't worry, we will be manually curating active whitelisted users without requiring bids. We believe this will increase the incentives for producing quality content because curation will be judged by manual curators looking to reward those who deserve it.
Non-Whitelisted Users
Now, whitelisted members will not be the only accounts eligible for our curation. We will also support the selections of other large curation projects. We will also be curating onboarded content creators. This has already begun through @OCD, but we will turbocharge this effort with some updates to that project and extra voting power.
With these changes, we will switch from a nonprofit model to a 10% fee that covers curators, and a 5% fee which will go into a pool used to approach and onboard content creators.
Our Focus: Growing the ecosystem
The 5% will go into a pool that will mainly be used to fund tipping. We are inviting Steem users to onboard content creators from different platforms. Onboarders will look for a good piece of content on Reddit or Twitter, comment and leave a Steem tip. We will be using Steemtipper created by @crimsonclad and @followbtcnews (Steem witness) once it's back up.
We will track their activity and they can join our discord and community to receive further curation and guidance on their Steem journey. We have seen good results and received positive feedback in our early trials. We believe this approach will help scale Steem's user base and onboard influencers from other platforms.
Communities & SMTs
This new approach will support the next phase of Steem's evolution with Communities and SMT integration. These changes are designed to empower the user base. We will still be one of the most profitable curation projects for delegators. But we hope that it is what we will actually do with the delegations to improve the health of the ecosystem and the value of Steem, that will keep you interested in continuing with us.
With #newsteem, we are finally heading toward a future with more human interaction and an ecosystem that is attractive to both existing users, and all of those to come.
Music to my ears @ocd
I know you said you would always prefer OCDB to be a manual curation entity rather than a bought vote @acidyo, but I remember you saying a few weeks ago that the time wasn't right.
Absolutely, and I witnessed that in how it was run and regulated. I'm glad to hear the time is right now with how well HF21/22 seems to have gone... even this cynical steemian is ready to throw his hands up and say 'it all seems to be working' 🙂
P.s. just wondering. Do whitelisted authors still need to use the #ocd-resteem tag on their posts? I've recently made a decision to stop worrying about posting daily and focus on high quality instead. Lol, so I think I'm a much better fit for curation these days.
The power of #newsteem, driving beneficial behaviour that incentivizes a focus on value adding rather than extraction. I'm pretty optimistic about steem at the moment, which is nice because it's been a while since I've felt that way.
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The tag was never a requirement, we started it a long time ago to add a few extra resteems next to the daily comps but was discontinued after a break and people just kept using it. :shrug: :D
We may revive it with your idea in mind though some time in the future. :)
Cheers for the info acidyo. I won't worry about the tag unless I see an article saying different.
P.s. I know curation from any of the guilds is an occasional blessing rather than a regular thing.
I'm just glad that there are more people out there looking now, and not just from my perspective with the content I make. From a much wider perspective, one of the first things I figured about steem when I arrived was that outside of the circle jerks etc, the real driving force behind helping reward fairly were the curation guilds. This knowledge created a positive impetus to improve and develop, and once I realised that many curators take engagement into account, it encouraged me to get involved in discord communities and projects.
This story is a common one for most new steemians who actually have some talent in content creation. I see curation guilds as the vital conduit between stake that wants to be passive and the community. Well, it's the healthy way for passive stake to build the network value and hopefully the price of steem.
Anyway, I'll shut up now 🤣 I'm just genuinely enthusiastic to see this news. Great stuff!
muy buen post jajaja, me gustaria vean mi blog y espero les guste mi contenido (apoyemonos)
Me too lol
I've been trying to get back here all day to say something, but I don't have much to say other than thanks for doing this.
Nice!
I really liked Steemtipper and wondered why it wasn't being used more. Good luck PoBs :D
Somehow* I had completely missed it going live. :(
Can you get the word out when it is back up? I think it appeared during the down-cycle and think tipping Tweeters could be huge.
Will promote it and burn the rewards. ;)
I'll be honest as a whitelisted author I was using the service for a while, but at some point it almost felt dirty being able to purchase a large vote. So I stopped and decided to let my small rewards be what they were and just keep plugging away.
Honestly this entire idea is amazing! It will be even more amazing if it can help the path towards real communities being born. Ones that are truly about a niche and about bringing in people from outside of the Steem community.
I'm looking into development of a niche community that doesn't require the current Steem user base to succeed. Goal will be to bring in people who are involved in the niche and introduce them to crypto as a bonus, but having a site worthy of their time even without the earnings. By creating what will be a stand alone site that integrates SMTs we will be attempting to create the true vision of what Steem can become IMO. Already have a couple non Steem people ready to join me and I'm barely in the planning stages. Helps that it's a niche that I'm deep into and have a good amount of contacts. Getting a little excited about the potential of everything.
Looking forward to this and hoping that once it gets going, all of the curation projects become a force once again that hunt down, lift up and promote content and authors who add value to Steem. =)
I've got to admit, #newsteem seems to be working as envisioned 😁
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Well, I did say...
👍😂 you were right
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It's this new trend called hmm, can't recall how it is called... I think I've heard it quite a lot.
Oh right, it's this new thing people refer to as #NewSteem. Seems like the biggest deal on the block (pun intended) and everybody is on board!
I am glad that we have finally got to this point and, now we have a lot further to go
Hey Eric, how can I apply for being whitelisted with @ocd please? I sometimes host contests that I would like to promote a bit so that more people know about them and can participate. Thanks and sorry if I have overlooked that info somewhere.
Yeah, let's power up PoB!
Great news! I have been whitelisted for a little bit now and used @ocdb a couple times but the whole bid bot controversy made me nervous.
I even got some down votes one time when you all manually curated one of my posts because someone was down voting anything you all upvoted as part of their anti bid bot campaign. In this case I chatted with the person and they removed their downvote.
But moments like that made me nervous about using @ocdb for my posts.
So I'm very happy you all are switching to manual curators and I hope my posts will get an occasional upvote from you all! :)
This is really good news @ocd! I guess NewSteem is really working and manual curation is increasing more and more! I hang around crypto reddit and crypto twitter and Steem seems to get a bad vibe mainly because of Dan (makes no sense since this is an open, decentralized permissionles project), hope you guys have more luck than I do when trying to get more members to Steem... People only care about Steem when the price is sky high I guess....
I've never been whitelisted by you guys, if you guys do have the time and are accepting new application I would love to know if my content is good enough to be whitelisted :)
How does OCD defines "great" ?
There are some objective factors like spelling, time spent creating the content, quality of the pictures/text/video, knowledge and expertise on the topic etc and other subjective stuff like opinion of the curator, preferences, expertise on the topic by the curator (for example I can't asses if a painting is good, but we have curators that do) and some others.
The good thing is that we have many curators focusing in finding great content for over two years now so we hope to deliver on the community's expectations.
You can add "verifiable sources" to back the statements made in a post, especially if it contains any scientific topic.
Also if there are lots of comments and real discussions in a post, that's an indicator of interesting content.
Original content, subjective quality by many curators with a lot of experience.
Experience in what? Running a social media business? Genuinely asking
Experience with curating content. That includes:
I have seen many curators vote for authors that turn out to be just stealing identity from a content creator form other platforms... and they are not easy to detect cos they are good at pretending. A good/experienced curator is more likely to detect these shady acts even by just scrolling through an author's blog.
Bring on the manual curation 💪
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Definitely! It's a task for everyone, not just the curation projects!
I agree! It's why I bought a few thousand steem these last few weeks to continue curating like a part time madman! While the going's cheap, it's a great time to load up!
I was already pretty engaged on the platform but now there's more rewards to gain from curation and takes the pressure off a bit of having to post every day to get author rewards 😀
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How delightful to read this ... I was considering doing @ocdb as a bot, but I am delighted with the manual curation that is now here under #newsteem! So, how do we draw @ocd's attention to our best content -- on Discord? Use of particular tags?
Great guys. Manual Curation is difficult but it definitely makes people very happy. Please choose to visit some of the quality blogs of budding writers. Let's bring PoB back to Steem.
Yay! So many good things happening with the #newsteem. More!!!
Also, where is this
im whitelisted but i never try ocd so,this would be amazing for users like me that works here as an artist and can get rewarded for his efforts and goals, thank you for work for art
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cool might start actifitting again soon :)
xD
Curation is so #steem, manual curation is so #newsteem :)
Thanks OCD elders for your work!
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Great update and thanks for all OCD does for our community
This post has been included in the latest edition of The Steem News - a compilation of the key news stories on the Steem blockchain.
So, no more sending SBD or steem with a link to @ocbd?
Thank you for the upvotes and support that I received in the last few months.
Keep the new good work!
No. :)
Well, choosing users who have not applied to being on a white list, sounds like real curation, well done!
Every great content creator will get a shot at getting curated :)
I know some content creators who, like me, did not apply to the whitelist, and all in Spanish, let's see if we are lucky, saludos :)
Yoooo! Coolest thing I’ve read all week:
Thanks @ocd, @ocdb, @acidyo.
Great news. Love to have somebody from the @ocd team at the next #SteemMeetupAachen on this Friday to give a talk about all this.
Feel heavily invited.
Would be fun but not close right now and moving soon.
At least I tried my best to bring you to the Meetup. https://steemit.com/deutsch/@detlev/steem-meetup-aachen-7-1
Thanks for all you are and all you do for the steemit community! Resteemed..
Sooooooooo many whales/bots having a sudden change of heart, lately! A wave of positivity and altruism is washing over the Steem blockchain. So many of the big players all of a sudden want to help the community! It's so great to see. And I thought this place was a bunch of sharks and profiteers? Obviously not.
Congratulations OCD, really applaud the move to curation!
I hope other vote selling networks make this pivot as well. Vote selling inherently undermines the process of honest voting and defeats our proof of brain system.
I expect great things to come from OCDB
Why does reducing the proof of brain consensus mechanism from a crowd to a few people warrant applause?
The fact that there are so many delegators implies there are potentially many instances of PoB validators cough lazy rent seekers coughwhich will statistically make the outcome of consensus fairer than if the power was pooled together and elected via few persons as we still have here.
Step in the right direction but middlemen still need to be cut out. Proof of Brain doesn't function as intended when the voting demographic is more centralised.
Curation is better than vote selling.
Manual curation is (arguably) better than auto vote sniping, at least for the health of the platform.
High concentration of stake based voting in the hands of a few curators, even if voting honestly, could result in a skewed representation of content discovery and rewards that doesn't align perfectly well with what would have happened had everyone's vote weighted equally. This is the problem of bad taste.
Vote selling/circle jerking/self voting are instances of content indifferent voting behavior
Content indifferent voting is far worse than the problem of bad taste!
I wish the number one problem we need to help solve is the problem of bad taste. But that's a luxury problem not even close to content indifferent voting in terms of the harm it causes.
So going curation for a bid bot is a huge step in the right direction. That's basically as big a win as you can realistically get around here.
In our last exchange, you mentioned that if we're not abusing the system, then why should other people get to?
That's a very good point and I stand by that.
If you wish to idle and not participate in curation, then you should get the 2.25% interest on SP. Not the greatly inflated (I assume) close to but below honest curator levels of return for doing zilch.
Problems of bad taste concern me just as much as content indifferent behaviour because aside from not being mutually exclusive behaviours, I believe that in a completely honest acting platform of people, I would much rather the forces of economic incentive drive censorship resistance and not centralisation.
Censorship can be thought of as :
1-(posts and authors that are considered for curation)
Where 1 represents all posts and authors.
By concentrating more and more voting power on a non trustless subjective and un-transparent process of curation, meanwhile creating cushy "curator" jobs in the process, we are pushing more and more people off potential honest rewards whilst funding a largely for profit (but arguably less value adding) operation.
I don't support that.
Funny you're bringing up centralizing of voting power.
This is also not true, anyone is welcome to join our discord and check out how the curation process of OCD happens. We even anonymize nominations so the inner curation is not biased on whoever curated it.
Not sure why I'm bothering explaining this to you, you're just dramatic cause the endless cash cow of guaranteed daily rewards ended when ocdb broke off the voting ring due to the new EIP.
Please take every opportunity you can get to make noise though, sure gets you more engagement than all your posts did in the last year.
The entire curation experience will always rely on one's subjective opinion. If it's at least honest, I'm happy.
I don't think the problem of bad taste is anywhere near as bad as content indifferent voting. Suppose you have 100 people effectively doing the curating platform wide. Chances are the overall result would be far better than if the system just sold votes to the highest bidder (or in some failed case here, pay the highest bidder the most to promote). Of course there a chance that 70 of the 100 curators are all nut jobs with terrible taste, but the probability of that is next to nothing. And it would probably take that many nut jobs to end up with something as bad as when bid botting completely dominates trending.
I guess if it makes you feel any better, it's much hard curating competitively if you have a lot of SP under management than if you only had a smaller stake. In other words, you can likely do better if you curated yourself strategically than if you handed your SP to a team and paid a fee. Also, as more curation projects pop up, competition over fees and performance will play a part too. There are a lot of factors that can improve the curation process over time platform wide.
I don't think it's really feasible to ask passive investors to settle for next to nothing and not allow them to delegate to curation projects. Remember, they were getting almost 100% of voting rewards delegating to bid bots (before free downvotes were a thing). Now they're getting a lot less.
Overall, even if you truly believed that concentrated stake curation is just a terrible as vote selling (which doesn't make much sense), at least now they're only getting 50% of the voting rewards rather than splitting 100% of the voting rewards between the delegator, bid bot owner and vote buyer. So overall, purely economically, it's a big win.
Of course these days bid bot returns shouldn't expect to be seeing high returns any more, with the threat of downvotes.
I don't want to see false prophets. But that is all I'm seeing. You can't pick and choose which aspects of proof of brain suit the platform for you and which that don't. If we are to work honestly with the system as designed, then we must stick to proof of brain in all its purpose which include socialising the allocation of rewards, providing incentive for honest authors to have the best edge of getting organically discovered by as many stake holders as possible.
Rent seeking delegators don't care about the cause, only the largest acceptable return that society deems morally sound. Right now, it seems like a huge loss compared to the 100% (or close to) return they enjoyed before, but it is still far too high for basically doing nothing. And as long as there is over allocation of resources to that endeavour, there will be (as we have here) people quick to gobble up that "opportunity".
The problem at the end of the day is that morally culpable or not, the end result is still that it undermines proof of brain which is what you advocated so strongly and now I advocate so strongly.
You can't force stakeholders to personally cast each vote at the individual level.
But we would much prefer it if their stake is used for honest voting rather than vote selling.
And that's exactly what we're getting now with OCDB.
All that stake that use to be used for content indifferent vote selling is now being used to pass value to content creators according to the subjective appraisal of their content.
They use to do a lot of damage, now they're doing a lot of good. It's a huge win for the platform.
This
Curation projects are, to me, inevitable anyway. Humans have a natural tendency to centralize. Historically; family -->tribe-->village -->city -->nation --> blocs of nations (the EU) and people now speak of world governments.
Internet did the same thing, where the vast majority of internet use is centralised around a few company's apps.
Simply put - because it's easier. I see curation groups as representatives for people who support that given cause. Much like an MP or something.
Whether or not you think this is a positive or negative thing, it's gonna happen regardless
Nobody disagree with that, But nobody goes clamoring when when a new vote seller is born.
This is centralization.
Thanks for transferation on manual curation, hope it belight journey..
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Glad to see you guys choosing the harder route. Without that human touch things become quite cold and lifeless.
First let me say I really appreciate your initiative and taking the time to manually curate . I know how much time and work that takes from being a curator for the @steemitmamas and @needleworkmonday community.
I am already a white-listed author but I was once told before that you mainly focus on curating authors with a reputation of 59 and below, meaning you are only focused on curating and rewarding newer Steemians. Does this still apply? Or will authors with a rep above 60 still have the opportunity to be curated by your team? Thanks for your time ~
@acidyo @anomadsoul
nice indeed
what is meant when great mind helps each other to others,
when we upvote each other it builds weak one steems to become stronger.
lets support fellow steemits to grow
what are the criteria to be noticed by ocdb curators?
any special factors and conditions or just like-dislike by curators?
I'm a white-listed author and a delegator, it's not just stupid interest;)
This post has been resteemed!
Good luck!
Congrats, good luck!
This is great, you have always shown a commitment to steemit and the community, most of the things you do, you do very well.
Many successes, since I am here I go after you wishing you the best.
@ocd, Good to see that with #Newsteem you are transforming yourself and coming up with new face of action which will going to add value to the Steem Ecosystem.
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I think I am among those of us on the whitelist who are already noticing the transition. Thank you so much for the support.
Hello there and nice initiative to go back to manual thanks to #newsteem 🙌.
I had applied to be whitelisted in the past but if I remember correctly, admissions were frozen.
I would like to apply again.
Thank you @ocdb for making curation « great again » ! 😉
I mean, the fundamental problem with this post is the lack of any mention of my toe
Fixed now :P
Why did you make me read it all again to look for it?? argh I didnt know you meant my own comment -__-
Ahaha actually my original comment was "fixed, but not gonna tell you where" but I changed my mind last second. The outcome was still as I intended though :P
lol... I mean, grrrrr
Great news about the changes.
I used to cringe whenever I read your posts about distributing Steem using your bid bot.
I would rather hold onto my Steem and manually curate. However many investors do not have the time to curate content. Therefore a curation service makes sense. I have mentioned this before in a few of my posts.
yeah we never liked bid bots and we started ocdb very late just to mitigate the rest of the effects of the other bid bots and maybe keep some stake going to deserving authors without it enriching the owners for doing something as simple as selling votes.
Glad it's over with and hopefully for good.
I read this after I submitted a bid...😭
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#EcoSystem
@ocd yesterday i send you 10.24 steem for my post https://steemit.com/technology/@malay11/how-human-can-see-at-night
But 8 hours past, i didnot recieve any vote. Please check.
Looking forward to this and hoping that once it gets going, all of the curation projects become a force once again that hunt down, lift up and promote content and authors who add value to Steem. =)
Thanks for visiting my posts and giving an upvote. Always glad to see your work on STEEM!
!giphy cheers
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// You can support giphy by using one of your witness votes on untersatz! //
Wow that's great news!
How do I know if I'm on the whitelist? 🤔
@ocd @ocdb
You're saying ... produce great content and you'll succeed?
Super
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i think newsteem is better
It is a nice innovation, keep up the good work. More enlargement to the community, and success
Thank you @acidyo for this effort to make the steem community better and it keeps on getting better because of the continued support from the active and talented devs within this community :D