A few months ago the website SteemFollower was published by the developer and witness @mahdiyari. The platform is very interesting but also very controversial right from the start. It offers two main functions:
Upvote for Upvote (kind of)
Collect tokens for upvoting Steem posts within the SteemFollower ecosystem. Usually you get as many tokens as your upvote is worth. You will then receive upvotes as long as you have tokens of yourself and as long as you are upvoting at least 5 posts every day. You don't have to upvote the person who upvoted you directly, so it is technically not upvote for upvote. If you don't have your minimum daily upvotes and/or if you have no tokens your post will not be listed on SteemFollower.
Follow for Follow (kind of)
The second main feature is the follower function where you can follow up to 30 people a day and get an equal amount of followers for that over time (only if people actually do pick your account there to be followed). You can go through the list of SteemFollower users who have active follow points and follow them manually. The only way to really make up your mind about them is by checking their user name, reputation, avatar and description text. of course you can check out their actual Steemit profile but I doubt that many people do that. As long as you have follower points your own account will be listed there for others to find.
Some extra perks are the affiliate link (which I use here in the post) that every user gets to make some profit from the upvotes somebody you referred to SteemFollower makes. And then there is also an internal market where you can buy and sell your SteemFollower upvote tokens. All the above is the status quo.
New Version of SteemFollower with SMTs
Yesterday @mahdiyari announced to change the platform drastically. Besides some new design and back-end he has some big plans for the platform.
The first big change will be the entire removal of the follower function. That of course makes the name SteemFollower a bit redundant but I guess that doesn't matter. Maybe he will change the name after all. I do think this is a very important change because the feature was in any way disturbing and put the whole platform in a bad light. Begone!
The upvote feature will stay and become the new focus point of the platform. @mahdiyari calls it a Manual Curation Platform. The already acquired points will remain in your balance. The new platform is aimed to be a competitor for Steemit, Busy, Utopian and ChainBB. Hence a new major platform for the Steem blockchain.
Instead of using internal tokens it will get its own official SMT via the new Steem system coming in early 2018. That means it will become an independent cryptocurrency with similar features like Steem and tradable against BitCoin and co.
My Ideas for the new SteemFollower
I do think that the idea in general is pretty cool. However, the way it was presented before invited people to not really read any post in the first place and just upvote anything to get the tokens and receive therefor upvotes to their own posts. Personally, I looked for people I know using the platform and upvoted their posts whenever I used SteemFollower. Either way it is not really favouring the Proof-of-Brain and rather an additional income stream.
Make it Open Source
There is no reason to not make it open source I think. The list of advantages is long: Contributions can be made by others and rewarded through @utopian-io. Task requests can be made that create an income for @mahdiyari and invite others to tackle bugs, suggestions, design and logo and much more. Basically the entire project becomes something that many will work on and not just one person. It would still be @mahdiyari's project and he could still monetize it and funnel some rewards to his project account.
Communities
To overcome this problem I can see the new version opening up to communities and categories. For example the @sndbox project could benefit from a platform that is filtering all Sandbox member posts for easier curation. Or it could allow to filter for specific tags to move just within this ecosystem. The received SMTs could be locked within this small ecosystem and only allow for receiving upvotes back if you have a post within this ecosystem yourself.
Curation Trails
It could be merged with SteemAuto and hand out rewards for following curation trails. To avoid abusing this system it should have some form of manual approval, maybe similar to the moderator function of Utopian.io. Doing something like this would make curation trails much more interesting and many people would want to follow projects like my @utopian-1up trail to increase their earnings while at the same time they invest their SteemPower into curating valuable additions to the Steem blockchain.
Distribute Promotion Tokens to the Upvoter
Currently you can promote your post by activating a 2x-5x feature where you pay more for each upvote according to your setting. if you do that your post will appear on the top of each list and many more people will see it. The burned tokens are either destroyed or go to SteemFollower. Instead it should give something like 90% of these extra tokens to the upvoter itself in order to make the promotion a hundred times more interesting and effective. The remaining percent could stay with the platform to cover costs.
Add Features to hide plagiarized and bad content
All users should be able to use the new SMTs to flag/hide posts which are obviously stolen or simply of super low quality. This has been one of the major problems with SteemFollower: Tons of @cheetah strikes (which was shown on the thumbnail of the post but still not clear enough) as well as many posts to just farm SteemFollower upvotes. It was very difficult to find anything useful.
A better way to find and browse posts
Currently you see 15 posts per page plus promotions. You can reload more with a click on a button. These posts are totally random. The filter options are New Posts, Top Users, Old Users, New Users and Top Inviters. None of these groups are really helpful and just give you tons of uninteresting posts from people you don't know and don't trust. Sure, it is good to spread your votes beyond your friends. But this is just not motivating at all right now. Instead there could be a Proof-of-Brain system that pushes good content further up the list. I am working on something like this myself for 1UP. I am not quite there yet to give a more concrete idea but I am sure there are many ways to accomplish this.
Conclusion
I do like the SteemFollower idea to earn tokens for upvotes. But right now it is not really valuable for the overall ecosystem of Steem because many just want to increase their earnings without caring about the content they upvote. We already have that on Steemit but here it is worth twice as much so many just do it. If the platform finds ways to make this a true curation effort than it could become a super popular and useful new website!
Hence I am really happy to hear that @mahdiyari is going to change and improve the platform drastically. SMTs sound nice but they do need a good system they are build upon. Please give your own thoughts to this project and how it could be improved to become something amazing.
Thanks for your ideas and suggestions.
I know this since day 1 and I was looking for a solution for this problems.
I want to create something Interesting for all users and not only for spammers.
SteemFollower had a bad presentation and that was my fault. My purpose was something great for New Good Writers to find a place to Promote themselves and find new Readers for their good contents.
I'm Really in bad position. I think every day and night about steemfollower and how to improve it, but my brain is very slow. I was interested to share steemfollower's source, but there was some security problems.
as you said we have a Token in Steemfollower and if someone find any bug inside the codes, it can be harmful.
I will share SF in utopian soon (after updating), but I know, there are not so many interested users to this project to make Contributes or etc for it and it will not make any sense.
it is not your slow brain, it is a fact, we can not think and connect everything by ourselves. that is the real good purpose of blockchainology, you spot something and you pass and place it to the place it belongs. this way all the things can be organize into a common sence order without any option of compromising its real purpose or value. steemit is replacing the real medias with an increasing interest into cryptos, throughout virtuality the reality can be solved. the real value of all goods created by every single aspect of this little planet can be taken in account in all its glory. there is like 4 I=s , intensification of the implementation of the interaction towards integrity. in other words, the more you hide, the more you have to seek, in other words, the more you give, the more you get. blockchainology is about to fill every corner of this planet, as predicted, no more politics, leaders, other misinformators needed to solve problems, they havent got capacity to solve. the same as you, the one man brain is just too small and slow to manage that sort of infos. i canot understand, how world politics can managed w few hundreds of brains :D just about the time for the change. what i see is a world, where every single part of this planet has got its meaning and just because of the lack of the one mans brain capacity there is no right to underestimate the value of every single butterfly wing
Everyone wants to contribute because they get money for it. People research unknown open source they never used just to make a contribution about it. As soon as it is open source people can earn money for suggestions, bugs and all the other stuff. You are underestimating people. Everyone is in it for the money.
You say it yourself: You need help, ideas and solutions. You don't need any delegation or sponsors to make this project happen. Utopian pays for it.
Let the hive mind decide what would work best and then follow up on that. :)
@mahdiyari
You cant really tell if many are not interested in making contributions until you make it an open source
I think you will get a lot of contibutions
Maybe people are already waiting to contribute
I would like to add that your reputation is not bad I think. You created the marvelous SteemAuto which is much better than SteemVoter and Streemian. And you do Steem development which in general is a good thing. Yes, your project was a bit of problem for many. And they are not wrong.
However, I am sure that people appreciate your effort to make this better. You probably should just make a new platform with a new name and only take over the tokens and nothing else. If you need feedback you can always contact me on Discord.
Thanks again.
I will take a good action about steemfollower. also a new feature for steemauto is coming in a few hours or 1~2 days.
Awesome, I will make a follow-up video about SteemAuto then.
@flauwy, the new features that will be seen on this steemfollower is quite interesting.
However, the total removal of the manual follower option to me is a major drawback.
In using that option to follow it means we concent to being followed back by people which we may not know.
That concent can be withheld by not following anyone.
I hope that the use of the manual curation will continue to exist because this helps minnows to be to get some curation for their content.
It is an form of support to minnows like me.
The curation aspect is indeed helpful to minnows (I am also a minnows, I have below 5k Steem Power). But it also gives you the illusion that people care about your because you got 50 votes on your post.
The follower system is even worse. I got 1000 followers from SteemFollower but 99.9% don't care about my content at all and never interact with me. So besides a nice number it brings zero effect. You don't want a follower that only follows you to get a follower point in return.
you are right
People will only follow you for token and may never visit you blogs to read your posts
Very good post and suggestions Flauwy. You basically made every registered person on Steemfollower a little bit richer!
Thanks, I think this project has a lot potential. I always thought that. But it really needs some fruitful discussion to make it like it should be.
100% agree.
As long as Steem exists Steemfollower will exist and thrive as well.
Just posted about Steemfollower today as well.
His platform needs more attention.
Everyone involved makes cash there!
Win-Win-Win!
@flauwy
I go with your recommendations
Followers and not really the main thing if they will end up not reading our content, i think the name too should be changed
Yep, the name gotta go.
@flauwy What do you think of the promotion feature currently? Do you think its worth using for those who have a lot of built up points?
Well, it depends what you want to achieve. If you want to find new followers and attract many people then it is a good idea. Otherwise it is not worth it.
Gotcha, thanks for the insight 🙏🏽