Upvoting because they like the content? Wow, what a novel concept!
Right now, a vast majority of curators are out to make a quick buck. It's very easy to learn and game the system. During my experiments with the curation articles, I was easily hitting 3% of my Steem Power per week.
It's pretty simple really, you just need to know the authors and topics that do well. You need to know the bots that upvote these authors, and at what time. More people are discovering these trends, and getting in on the action.
The end result is you see the same authors, the same subjects, the same tags on the Trending page day after day. The whales are doing a great job in diversifying content, but it's not enough.
I like the suggestion of offering a warning at the Trending page upvote. If a post is at $300, someone holding a lot of Steem Power can still receive a pretty decent curation reward for upvoting, so stopping it entirely will just discourage that. Instead, as @smooth points out, it's about educating the user that their upvotes have negligible impact.
But getting back to my initial rant, the main problem is well before the Trending page. People are simply much less motivated to check out and upvote content from an unknown other and a niche subject.
My suggestion would be along the lines of penalizing curation rewards on "sure shots". By successful authors, and in successful subjects. I should receive a much greater curation reward from upvoting a post by a new author talking about neuroscience than Dan talking about Steemit. I hope someone more attuned with algorithms reading this can make more sense of this thought.
Let's see how Hardfork 13 helps with the bots.
"The end result is you see the same authors, the same subjects, the same tags on the Trending page day after day." Absolutely agree! The system is closing itself this way. If the concept of Steemit is evaluation the "content" not more (the author for example), all articles, upvote and downvote have to be anonymous.
That's not realistic, but it will be an interesting experiment. I bet the trending page would then look completely different.
Completely different every single day! And exactly this will keep the fire of Steemit. Now the fire is only keen, but for how long? Why do you think it's impossible? Technically or for other reasons? It's just β version. A lot of improvements ahead. Although I'm not an IT, sure it could be. Too much information is shown to all users. Wallet, transactions, feeds, reputation ... The downvote must to be anonymous to work. No one wants to make enemies unless he is not the God.
^^^THIS
I had express the same idea before weeks and @ned seem to agree with it ;)
https://steemit.com/steemit/@anyx/cheetah-bot-the-fight-against-spam-and-plagiarism-continues#@liondani/re-rockymtnbarkeep-re-anyx-re-rockymtnbarkeep-re-anyx-cheetah-bot-the-fight-against-spam-and-plagiarism-continues-20160721t213857253z
Or give a bonus to curators that found a successful "outsider"!!! ;)
Yes, that's a much more positive way to put it. :)
To be fair, the current system does reward large SP holders more with new finds, but it's the masses that need to get behind this idea.
yes, I agree. I suggested earlier in some discussion that it might be better to link rewards to reputation. As much as I like @complexring, I think it's unjustified that a post like this earns more than several small fish have in their entire accounts combined.
I would say that curation reward should be higher if you are early to up upvote a popular article from a newcomer with low reputation than from upvoting a 60+ rep account. Its very easy to just upvote anything from a high rep person, expecting it o do well without reading. With over 100 votes, that's what happened to that simple "test" post of complexring, which he justly tagged as "spam".
Me too ;) Take a look here ....
https://steemit.com/steem/@dantheman/negative-voting-and-steem#@liondani/re-dantheman-negative-voting-and-steem-20160814t175827625z
I'm with you man! that's my point as well. I am not too happy with your solution, we don't need one that stifles upvotes, but maybe we can find a happy middle :)
Yeah, I didn't go into details as I'm well aware it sounds radical and controversial. But I'm sure someone good with the numbers can find a sensible middle ground.