I don't think these proposal touch the core of the issue.
The issue right now is that curating what people like goes against what is profitable. I think we tried to create curation mechanism that attracts good content. However when I curate I am driving by when I vote for something and also how popular that person is. I.e. i will always vote for your content just because you are popular and it is profitable.
People never should vote for me, because I am not. Even if I create great content voting for me is very very risky and it is much smarter to just wait for someone with a good history and vote his next article exactly 30 minutes after he/she publishes it.
Curating is much more a self-fulfilling prophecy than selecting quality right now.
What you propose above does not deal with that.
I think we need to look again at what can we do to attract great content and reward it. And we also need to make sure that new users do not get pushed away.
I have brought several people to this platform that have written what I think is pretty decent content and have not received any votes, we need to figure out how to give them a little recognition. Otherwise they all go back to Facebook.
I have written about your bounty system and given a way to improve: https://steemit.com/steemit/@knircky/the-potential-of-bounties-an-improvement-proposal-for-steem-to-double-its-value
@Ned Please read and give feedback. I also have some ideas about how to improve retention. Let me know if any of my input is useful and I will keep contributing.
This post should have more upvotes.
Just recently there was a post from @gavvet that received 250 votes in less than an hour with 0 comment, this is completely messed up. How is it that 250 people upvoted him and not one person commented? You guessed it, because not one person actually read his post, they just checked author username to see if they would get a good curation reward and blindly upvoted it. Good content gets a lot of interest ( comment ) I think they should only give curation reward to the first 20 people who upvote or something but they really need to do something about this.
Popularity is not that same as "quality". A voting system will always measure popularity (which is something that aggregates across voters) and not quality (which is something people will rarely entirely agree about).
If you want to reward quality the only way to do that is with non-aggregated rewards, meaning you decide what you think is quality and you reward it by tipping with your own money. You are perfectly able to do that now. Do more of it and you will attract more of the quality you seek.
that would actually be a cool idea to have your own tipping "unit", whatever amount that is for you personally, and then simply transfer it to the writer directly. Particularly once you had enough accumulated that each unit was relatively...insignificant (not the right word but you know what I mean). Might look to experiment and maybe write a piece about it. Thanks for the (now obvious) idea @smooth!
Agree with your points. Quality is impossible to define.
You say vote for what I think good quality is. The issue is the curation does not work that way. I get rewarded if I vote the way everyone else is voting. SO instead of voting for what I like, I should vote for what I think is popular.
I think this is not optimal and should be looked at. If I could actually vote for what I like and everyone else too, then I think the platform wold be much better.
@smooth can you please give me some feedback on the proposal I wrote and referenced above. It has a short summary that should allow you to make a judgment quickly. If you dislike it please let me know what? I am certain it is not a waste of your time.