Stake-Weighted vs Account-Based Voting: Is the Trending Page About to Change!?
There's been a lot of excitement over the last few days about the way we vote here on Steemit. This all stems from a talk Ned Scott did at the GOPAX Meetup in Seoul, South Korea, where he discussed Smart Media Tokens and the option to use Account-Based Voting instead of Stake-Weighted Voting. This got a lot of attention from the Steemit community due to the many complaints users have had about our current Trending page algorithm. Many in the community seemed to believe that this was a hint of what's to come for us here on Steemit.
But would account-based voting actually improve the way "good content" gets ranked on the platform? And is this something that we would even see get added to Steemit? I answer these and other questions in today's video.
Links Mentioned in Today's Video:
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My issue with the trending page is it is synonymous with the log in/homepage of steemit. At the moment, there is trolling/shilling and obvious agenda-driven blogs showing up there. Many times, it is like reading an info-mercial. Most people are pretty savvy and understand what is going on with this kind of thing; they are a little less savvy wrt to the shill-trolls who are purposely sowing discontent to sabotage steemit.
The homepage needs to be pro-steemit and show quality and not agenda and certainly not an anti-steem agenda. I have it from @ned himself that steemit.com can modify the homepage without a hardfork. I think steemit works quite well but it does need to be grown. Our homepage should work for us and not against us. The posts there should be curated and appear for a shorter time. The shilling shenanigans that usually hang around it are not representative of the steemit community and should not be the face we show to the world.
I know there are a lot of quality blogs on steemit ... lets showcase them on the title page and not the work of Brutus and Judas. I find steemit to be the best online experience I have yet to have. It is a fantastic place to show-case work. But the front door needs painting and repair.
You're today's comment winner!! 😎🥂
Each day I pick a random comment on my post to upvote and today was your lucky day 🙌🏻
Cheers, Brandon:)
I think account based voting will not bring the desired results. From the limited amount we know it will just incentivize spammers to flood accounts.
In fact I wrote a post about it:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@nealmcspadden/account-based-voting-is-a-terrible-idea-for-steem
Hey, Brandon. What do you think of DTube's new update?
Regarding the trending page, I don't even look at the trending page on YouTube. On there, I found the people i wanted to follow and I just look at my feed. On here however, it's not easy to find people to follow. YouTube makes it easy to find what you want to watch. Steemit makes it difficult. That's what they need to improve. Once they do, I can add more quality content to my feed.
From what I read, I like it. I think it's a great way to give back to the community who are using their platform. It's also a MUCH better use for the beneficiary rewards.
The only way I see a change from stake-weighted to account-based voting, is if they also enforce a KYC form, which would assure no one can have multiple accounts, or at least not more than a few. I'm not sure how many steemians would like the KYC idea. I also doubt Steemit or any other small company with an app on the Steem blockchain has the manpower to handle such work.
i think this is where, from my understanding, the SMTs and communities come into play. there will be "oracles" (leaders of the communities) that verify the people (not sure how) and the voting structures of these SMTs will allow the community to utilize the token of their group to vote the members of the group according to the values of the group. my understanding thus far from a vid i watched earlier shared here: https://steemit.com/steemit/@kafkanarchy84/smts-oracles-and-account-based-voting-ned-s-asia-tour-easter-egg
Thanks for sharing! This is a must watch video, in my opinion.
This is true. And many of us already have multiple accounts, including myself. Unfortunately, a lot of people would be against this due to the whole "decentralized" nature of the blockchain. But that would have to be added which would slow down the signup process even more. I know that hard fork 20 is actually focused on speeding up that process.. so I don't know.
I totally agree. We need to limit multiple accounts for sure. I have no idea how to go about it, but this will prove essential going forward.
Sure! If 2, 3 maybe even 5 accounts can be acceptable, 100, 1000 or more is sheer abuse.
Personally, I don't understand why anyone need even so many as 5, but I agree.
There are people who create various projects, most often each needing their own account. And if you are involved in many such initiatives, it is very likely you'd need a number of multiple accounts for them.
Maybe there can be a separate "type" of account for those who run initiatives or develop projects. Because you're right; I needed a separate account for @minnowfund or otherwise Cheetah would be flagging it for plagiarism every week. I was able to setup that account and have it whitelisted by Cheetah because it met certain requirements. But yeah, I have 4 accounts for various things but couldn't really see needing more than 10 unless you're programming a lot of different apps on the blockchain.
As long as monitoring those multiple accounts to be sure they are serving a community interest is possible, effective and frequent, then sure...why not?
Hmm, that would be interesting... A different type of account... Like "business" versus "non-profit" versus "personal"?
BOScoin is doing it based on eye scanning technology. So basically ensuring uniqueness without kyc. Full disclosure I'm holding some BOScoin
Retina or fingerprint scanning, this may be a step less than KYC, but only if a hash is kept of the scan, and not the scan itself.
@brandonfrye I never thought I would watch the whole 14 min video but your words were chosen wisely and you didn't wasted a second. Thanks for saving me to watch the whole 3 hour GOPAX Video 😆
Thanks @coincado lol :)
The trending page on any platform will usually lean toward virality or who's wallet is bigger lol
They can just pay to promote stuff if their vote doesn't hold as much power.
Right, as long as there's a way... people will find it.
best of luck @brandonfrye
I'm very excited for these kinds of updates. I've written about and have seen many other complain about the trending page on Steemit. I hope the account based voting will improve the quality of the trending page on Steemit.
I'm scared of all the spam bots. I commented on someone else's post about how Steemit should reward for reporting spam.
Steemit will replace Reddit one day. I'm excited for the future.
I'm really excited for Communties (or HiveMind) because I think this will be a much better way to categorize content and allow people to more easily find what they're interested in. I haven't heard if it will be rolling out in the next fork, but I hope so.
I hope there are communities, but with new featutes. Reddit's subreddits are great for categorization, but I don't like some of the controlling admind of those subreddits.
I fully share the desire of all the good people of this community to make the rewards system here more representative of the quality, and not the longevity/cronyism of the poster. Ned's latest comments in Korea are very promising, although they need to apply to steemit.com, and not just on these SMTs. However, the options for rewarding our contributors represent a continuum. At present we are at one end of the spectrum--rewarding longevity, and ignoring quality. Ned's "solution' (one person-one vote) represents the other end of that same spectrum. IMHO, it would be as unworkable as the current situation.
Right now, with all the bots posting and these 3rd-world mail-order bride memberships, one-man/one-vote will STILL result in poor content being unfairly rewarded. What we need is a middle ground--a weighting system that (for example) gives 70+ reputation members 7 times the voting weight of a 10-rep member, 3.5 times that of a 20-rep...and so on. A 60+ reputation member would get 6 times the weight of a 10-rep, 3 times that of a 20-rep, etc. a 50+ rep member would get 5 times the weight of a 10, rep, 2.5 times the weight of a 20-rep, etc. I think you get the idea. This algorithm could, of course be made even more exacting, and the weighting is just an example.
Still, it would be a vast improvement over the current system where someone like Haejin can post an article with average ( or even below average) content and get $500-1000 SBD, whereas an excellent article by a newbie might get nothing, or get his measly $.01 or $.02 "dusted."
The reason the U.S.A. has been so successful (except for the past 40 years, or so) was because our government was a blending of the spectrum of possible leadership/reward structures. We chose the middle path (a republic) between the opposing tyrannies of monarchy and absolute democracy. The Steemit community must do the same.
Egalitarianism and meritocracy must be our watch words as we strive, rightly, to put the best content forward as possible.
You bring up some great points. I like the idea of using reputation as a factor in determining voting weight. I've actually never even considered that before. Of course, people can also build their rep by using upvote bot accounts... but I think that rep should factor in somewhere. Maybe even a combination of rep + stake + amount of votes.
Sure, Brandon. Like I said, we need a middle ground between the current system and one-vote, one-account. It could certainly be a combination (algorithm) of a variety of factors, for sure. As you rightly pointed out on the video just now, that is ripe for abuse, and would be as bad, or worse than the current system.
I really think we need to get Ned thinking about this for Steemit.com, and not just on these other spinoff ideas/platforms.
I agree. It's like Steemit was originally the guinea pig for the Steem blockchain and was the testing grounds to prove out the concept. And now it's almost like SMTs have assumed that role. I think we'll see many changes coming to Steemit.com in the future as the community continues to voice these ideas for change. It's just a matter of the witnesses getting together, and coming to a consensus about how we should proceed.
The ability to change/adapt with community input is what makes this place revolutionary, and potentially a major, major threat to the"big boy" platforms out there. PLEASE, if you get wind of any undercurrent among the whales/witnesses for moving the rewards system in the direction we're talking about, do another video on it (and try squeezing it in well before your trip.) BE WELL and safe, btw...and have a great trip!
Thanks @mepatriot, I definitely will. I appreciate it! :)
I am waiting for some change to voting. Current voting system doesn't promote good content, just vested interests
I don't know if it would make for better curation, but it would be more democratic!
Sorry dude, I'm not even sure if there is a conversation to be had here. Ned didn't say anything about this change being made to the Trending Page, or to Steem at all... so it just seems like a big, unlikely 'what if' type question.
As you pointed out, I don't think Account-based will improve anything... I do have seen posts on other platforms of people trying to sell 3000 Steem userids... and we know there are nearly a million accounts out there, but only really 70K active daily users... that's a huge gap.
Also... popular doesn't equal good. The fact that Logan Paul is one of YouTube's biggest stars is all the proof we need there.
It really is just a "what if" conversation. I was sort of surprised to hear him say that stake-weight voting hasn't worked out on Steemit, but then only went on to say that account-based voting would be an option for SMTs. It's like.. okay.. and what about Steemit though? lol
I have a feeling that Steemit will be an ever evolving platform that will see many changes over the years. And the Trending page algorithm will most definitely see its share of updates. But as of right now, as you said, nobody is really proposing any solutions. And I don't feel that account-based voting would improve anything anyways.
And yeah, it's insane how many accounts people can create if they have the know how. But Steemit.com is only approving a small number of legit accounts per day. I've heard of people waiting weeks to get approved. I'm happy to hear that they're actually doing something about this in the next update. I'm just wondering if this update will also make it easier for spammers to create more accounts.
Yeah, the accounts going officially through steemit.com are taking weeks (I was greeting newbies for a while and lot of people said they waited a long time), but there are lots of other ways to create accounts... I can literally do one in 3 minutes with @anonsteem.
I am surprised that steemit gets virtually no attention from Steem Inc... even look at the buttons next to the reply button; 'Share on Facebook', 'Share on Twitter' and then just 'logo-reddit'... QA is not real strong here. Like you said in the video, I do think Communities and Hivemind will be a big deal... I'm actually a little bit doubtful on SMTs, I actually can't think of that many business-cases for them that aren't kind of gimmicky... but I'm also super hopeful that I'm totally wrong there because I really want this platform to succeed. I'm honestly really excited that Ned is getting out and about!
You got a 85.00% upvote from @brandonfrye courtesy of @brandonfryeroi!
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I am split on how this will impact the platform but also highly doubt this will be able to get through given the current voting structure. However, I think there are more things that can be done that will improve the reward distribution before having to resort to this such as the HiveMind change as it will better categorize pages so that participants could be more efficiently channelled to their interests.
Great video man and a topic that will come up so much more in the future too.
Co-signing what @gadrian said. A KYC form might play a part in anything going forward for account based voting. But quite a few Steemians don't seem to be huge fans of dishing out personal information lol so I don't know if that'll ever come to fruition.
I'm just excited that Ned's been out there talking about STEEM whenever possible. That's been awesome to watch.
It should be account based voting including reputation and stake. Also including activity on the blockchain :)