There are a lot of complexities to consider when trying to fix one of the biggest economic shortfalls we have as a blockchain. Instead of getting into all of the theoretical implications, I'll keep it simple. We need a solid burn mechanism for the blockchain. I've already basically written off any fixes to curation until Communities and SMTs get implemented, which I feel are in some ways necessary to create a content driven dApp on STEEM, but that doesn't mean we have no options right now.
Ultimately I want Steemit Inc to implement this change on the official steemit.com website, but we really don't have to wait for them to do this. Busy, Partiko, or Steempeak could easily implement the change that I'm about to suggest and I hope that one of their devs at least considers what I'm about to suggest. Without further ado, here is what I think is one of the easiest and most obvious solutions to plugging a giant hole in the STEEM ecosystem: We should make post promotion competitive.
I suggest we do this as suggested in this pull request. Essentially, the goal is to get rid of the "promoted" tab that it would seem the majority of people don't use. We then place promoted posts interspersed throughout the hot and trending tabs, possibly even into our personalized feeds if we want to really drive competition. A simple suggestion of how to do this would be one in every five posts in these sections is a "promoted" post that requires a user to burn STEEM or SBD and compete for placement higher up the list. This gets rid of the monopoly that bidbots have on post promotion and creates a viable burn mechanism for our blockchain.
If there is no interest in doing this from an official Steemit Inc development level, then the alternative is to do this for other front ends. Partiko, Busy, and Steempeak as well as others could incentive burning STEEM/SBD for post promotion and possibly reward users with SMTs in the future or work with the devs for STEEM Keychain to implement tokens through them. There are ways that this could be used to benefit the different front ends by taking a percentage of the STEEM/SBD that would have been burned and powering up their community accounts.
I think this change gets rid of the need to consider implementing and selling ads from outside of the STEEM ecosystem to drive value into the platform by letting users create that same value by promoting themselves. Clearly people want to promote their content, why not create a way to allow them to do so while also adding value to the platform? Thanks for your time and consideration. Namaste.
Although I like the idea of incentivizing burning of STEEM, I have recently argued in The Sustainability of Steem - Is Freemium Broken? that ads are ultimately not what users should want, even though it might make the platform (more) sustainable.
The problem is that the goals of advertisers are always different than those of users. Placing irrelevant posts into the feed will always degrade user experience. And if the posts are not irrelevant, then they don't need paid promotion (they need recommendation, better organic reach).
Interfaces might act on the incentive of taking a cut of the promotion, but it will still be just fixing of one freemium model (the current, based on speculators) with another freemium model (based on ads).
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That's a solid point, ultimately there's nothing from stopping a company from getting an account, making a post about their services and botting it up trending now I suppose. I'm very much interested in fining sustainable burn mechanisms for this blockchain and it feels like being told "wait for communities and SMTs and pray that steemit inc saves us" just doesn't sit right with me. The purpose of blockchain is decentralization obviously and maybe it's just really starting to sink in how centralized we actually are, because even if we create solutions and the top twenty witnesses are on board, we are essentially left with "fork or don't fork."
Lately I've been thinking a lot about what behavior on Steem supports sustainability (and the price of STEEM) and I ended up with curation. Curation could make people power up, which takes liquid STEEM out of circulation and decreases supply. But curation is broken and always has been - that's why we are trying to fix that at Steeve. But I will re-iterate these thoughts with burn on my mind, I totally forgot about this option. Thanks for bringing it up!
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Not sure it is as simple as that. I still think that promoting posts "artificially" is handy, particularly for new users. It is pretty hard to build up your list of followers without getting to Trending or Promoted, unless you are lucky enough to be resteemed by a Steem celebrity. So it is actually good for new users to be able to promote their post and get some attention. And IMO Promoted is way more clear than using bidbots...
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I hate to be a party pooper but the problem is not to much steem but rather to few people.
As far as down voting by your "elite caring community" and all this group control stuff talking in chat, makes me feel like this comment section has been hi-jacked by the control freak "community".
Encouraging more down voting is 100% the wrong thing to do if you want steem to grow.
I'm guessing you either didn't read anything in the post, have an issue with someone that commented on the post and are trying to triangulate me into some unrelated bullshit, or are just going around with a chip on your shoulder due to something that happened on the platform, but literally nothing you said relates to anything I said in the post and just sounds like griping and projection to me.
I clearly said in your comments section and the first line is about your "entire post".
The problem is not to much steem = burning tokens is not the answer. Unless ofc you want to kill the social aspect of steem.
The biggest problem that I see is that curation has been broken and there is no interest in fixing it, because STEEM is not meant to be a social platform, it's meant to be a blockchain that runs dApps and is designed specifically to run social dApps. Ned thinks that Oracles, SMTs, and communities can solve the problem of broken curation and spam content and many other issues that I have issues with.
I agree that in theory it's possible those additional features will fix my biggest issue with the platform and the bulk of our economic woes. Burning STEEM is counter inflationary and just makes good business sense to me, but we don't have to agree on that, I'm just offering solutions to problems that I see.
Ultimately we need incentive for people to hold tokens and while Resource Credits isn't perfect, it's a step in the right direction in my opinion. I don't think flagging is the issue that it's made out to be, it doesn't censor anyone as you can click "unhide post" and all it really does is cancel out rewards.
Is it annoying when that happens? Sure, I've pissed off people and had weeks worth of posts flagged to zero out of spite. My posts are still on the chain though and no amount of flagging or disagreements is going to change that. Building an entire "gift economy" and expecting the majority of people to go around and donate their stake like charity to let the beneficiaries of that charity devalue their investment by powering it down and selling it because there is no incentive to power up is a much bigger problem.
There's a reason most of the really large stake investors on the platform either self vote or sell votes, it's the most profitable thing to do. I think fixing curation and making it the most profitable fixes the self voting and vote selling issues as the best content would offer the most rewards for curation. The issue there is we have basically been told to wait on a development that may or may not be coming. Until that happens, we bleed money, so I'm offering a suggestion on how to stop the bleeding and increase the value of the platform.
Is liquid STEEM the real villain? No, but burning it is a potential solution to one of the real problems we have that we could implement without waiting on developments that could never come. Steemit Inc doesn't have the best track record of delivering, so I'd rather be proactive and educate the community on these things.
Thanks for the clarification and hopefully my clarifications help clear up why I'm suggesting this idea (again for like the hundredth time) and hoping it doesn't fall on deaf ears.
I've been an advocate of burning steem too. I wouldn't mind seeing some promoted posts in my feed if they were marked as such - because I know they burned STEEM to do it so I do indirectly benefit.
If the bidbot hate is strong - UIs can discount the effect of bidbots on what they show users. That doesn't stop the bot users from making profit sometimes but it does dampen organic growth of their account.
Ultimately I think the biggest problem we have is that we have a theoretical attention economy built on top of an economic model that doesn't support that. We desperately need to fix curation and the previous response I got from Ned was that communities and SMTs could do that. The real question is whether or not those things will ever actually come to exist.
This is fascinating and I'd like to hear more about the idea. I had not heard of a "burn mechanism" before Steem Monsters; it seems to work quite well for them.
Well we do have one for the blockchain and subsequently steemit.com, the problem is since bidbots came along, no one uses it. I totally get it though, the Promoted tab is kind of a dumpster fire of shitposts most of the time, but believe it or not there was a period in time about two years ago where people used it and you could find quality content there. I think revamping the mechanic and putting it to better use could really serve the community.
So people paid to promote their posts, and the money went to steemit inc (or was simply reabsorbed into the rewards pool)?
How weird that they would have let something like that go. I would think that could've made things much more sustainable these last 8 or 10 months.
The fee doesn't go to anyone. It gets transferred to @null and it disappears.
https://steemit.com/@null/transfers
It's a burn account, so it destroys the token as soon as it gets there. You can see a few people still use it. The value created is by removing supply and creating scarcity.
If hadn't already seen the Steem Monsters example, I would think that was a terrible waste l to "burn" money. I think I get it, though.
Economics is so weird.
It's almost like biology, huh, where stuff has to decay and die in order for growth to make any sense?
This was suggested more than a year ago in a post by Steemitblog where they asked for user input. They then acted like they were possibly going to implement some of the suggested features...then went into maintenance mode and did almost no changes.
I think that this would increase the amount of Steem burned...but where they placed the promoted posts would have an extreme effect on that. They could include them in trending, but few even read trending anymore. They could also put promoted posts on the top of pages and interspersed in our feed. They could even put them at the bottom of posts themselves when you click into them.
They could also have promotional features for different interfaces that take a percentage and send the rest to @null.
I think it's a mistake to completely abandon all funds from advertising, burning them. Front-ends need to finance themselves. If they don't have a massive stake that they mined early on, they have to take a percentage of posts, or use advertising, or find some other way to raise funds. They could also do a hybrid model.
I think that perhaps choosing to burn part of the fund taken from users to place posts throughout the site for advertising purposes has real merit. It would help the health of the coin. Of course, only steemit can survive burning all the Steem it gets promoting posts.
If I ran a front-end, I would consider using ads, including traditional ones, as well as Steem posts. Depending on how lucrative that was, when combined with an optional percentage of posts, I would consider burning some, possibly automated by a bot, promoting posts through @null that were advertised through the site.
You are right that it sucks that interfaces get nothing and it is just burned. I have a feeling that not many will decide to implement it. It does support Steem, which in the end improves the position of everybody on Steem, but there is no direct advantage for an interface to use built-in Promoted and populate the site with it, right?
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No, not really. Which is why I made the suggestions I did. Maybe you randomly have some posts from promoted, with a lower chance, and still have a tab for them, but for the most part advertise posts that have bought advertising directly from your site.
seems like a much better idea then open marketing :-)
Why would people use this over buying votes if burning is essentially 100% loss?
It's competition. If a promoted post is guaranteed placement on trending, sure people could spend hundreds of dollars buying votes to put their post up there, or they could see how much was spent promoting the first "promoted" post and outbid them by any amount. It creates an alternative system to compete with bid bots that adds value to the entire blockchain by burning tokens. Essentially if I look at trending and the options are "Send $500 SBD to bid bots or burn $30 SBD to get to the top" I then have options to figure out which is more worthwhile to me. If the spot at the top of trending is what people really want, then it isn't about the theoretical return, and at this point I think most people see through the "it's free promotion to use a bid bot" logic, but even if they don't it's irrelevant, because some people will see the value in burning the tokens and be rewarded for it.
Okay, so if the goal is to create competition, I can understand that, but it will be even more difficult to remove "spam/abuse" - or how would you deal with it, since downvoting won't result in a lower rank, right?
Personally? I would probably deal with it by just muting people spamming garbage posts. I'd love for them to burn SBD to promote their shitposts though. Muting them = I don't have to look at it. It's no different than having people spend tons of money sending garbage to the top of trending currently, sure some bidbot owners are blacklisting obvious garbage now, but look at the situation we ended up in last time someone sent a post to the top of trending about sucking their own dick... it took days of basically begging whales and bidbot owners to flag/remove votes. Neither system is perfect, but one does increase the value of the other tokens on the platform.
What we could do is to create a soft-consensus "group of Steemians" who is in charge of muting/removing promoted posts.
Last time I brought anything like that up, @ned seemingly implied that was the purpose of the whole Communities/Oracles updates. Ultimately I guess we'll just have to see if those come about though, but I agree it would be great to have a way to remove junk without having to run my own front end. Different front ends already have the option to curate their own content and get rid of spam, but that doesn't fix the "flagship."
My humble opinion is that the bot system does not give an effective marketing and has generated imprints within the steemians.
People want to see more post organic trend
I agree, but this requires a different method than giving an alternative way to promote. In my opinion, this requires incentivized downvotes and higher curation rewards.
If it requires a very delicate teamwork and the hypotheses that are generated, update each day more.
It is necessary to make a system that a company sees the effective marketing to promote its product or its application in the blockchain and would be willing to pay 5000$ in the future to advertise in steemit by divesos methods that exist in digital marketing.
Thanks friend for your good comment
I don't think down votes really work in this environment. Largely because the down voting places the voter in a unique group of people voicing opposition and they view it as a waste of a vote.
Something that is commonly seen in society, is a situation where one person cries for help, but no one helps. But when one person decides to help, everyone does.
Down voting is the exact same thing. Very few people deliberately down vote because it doesn't seem advantageous to the person doing the down voting, so naturally, why do it?
The real way to remove bid bots is to increase their costs.
In a natural environment, bid bots would never exists because there there would be some form of arbitrage to expose their weaknesses.
In the case of steem, the arbitrage doesn't exists because a portion of bidbots services are subsidized by steem Inc's nodes. If that cost gets tacked on, surely the roi on bidbots would decrease substantially. Then capitalism occurs and the true cost of bid bots are revealed.
I think steemit lost control when bid bots came. If you really wanted to get results from Promoted bid bots where the way and still are in order to rank high thats where the results come from plus you make the steem back.
There is just far to little in terms of income being generated from steemit. There legit is like nothing all thats happening is Ned and the gang selling off mass amounts of steem every money depleting the system. A business can only operate that way for so long.
Income streams need to be placed on the site that make it a profit or at least break even it should never be negative.
Right, I agree 100% that some sort of revenue needs to be generated to offset endless spending. Their economic model is to increase the value of STEEM and profit from that, which is really the way it needs to be as we need their incentive to perform to be tied to the value of the currency. If the blockchain didn't operate like that, then they would have no purpose for holding such a large stake. Burning the tokens increases the value by raising scarcity, which is what I'm suggesting. Other than them bringing in ads, which I'm sure you've seen ads in the crypto space which are all scammy as hell, there really aren't a lot of ways to generate revenue without increasing the overall value of STEEM.
sure there are, there are legit a good amount of us enraptures on here and I am sure many more would come if they knew they could promote their ads and services on here. Pretty much they would be changing everything over from Youtube, blog, instagram etc over to a crypto site and steem honestly has all of those at the moment.
I say totally get rid of the trending pages etc since they are just fluffed up with the same people all the time and really are not doing what they where meant for. Instead have a paid area for this bump up the promoted section a bit.
Revenue comes from small business gaining exposure its what every social network uses. There is no reason why steemit couldn't do that in some form but not be abusive with it because we as voters etc have the rights to say what we do and dont want in here including flagging bad spammy advertisers.
Massive potential here it just needs some adjustment, think tanking and work. I really dont get what we got out of this last year that 70% of the steemit work force was working on? I dont think I saw a damn thing really
Well gauging by this comment:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@ned/re-paulag-re-ned-next-livestream-this-thursday-dec-6th-at-11am-cst-20181204t163117297z
It's clear we didn't get nor do they feel we're entitled to anything from them. For half the stake on the chain though, I think many people tend to disagree with that assessment... It is what it is, if things don't change, the price clearly shows where things are heading.
I believe Eon was working on something like this, but don't quote me on that one. I've been a big proponent of this idea for the longest of times, but obviously steemit.com is basically done with development.. so its up to the other dapps.
Eon was on that pull request. I actually had one of the devs point to me to that pull request when I first thought of this idea a while back. Clearly great minds think alike. :P
I think the idea is good, we should propose ideas that are attractive as you are.
Another idea is that people who use dapp as Dtube can advertise and promote with steem at a lower cost to promote it but that money comes from the companies, it would be an investment to the platform.
Speaking of marketing post paid with bitbot only benefits its creators because it is not effective to advertise and very expensive.
I can contribute more ideas at neuromarketing level for your idea:
As smart:
Depending on the tag you use, be promoted in the feed of people who use more a specific tag
Example:
If Jim wants to promote his post with the crypto tag, its content will appear longer in the people who use that tag more.
I have many ideas to contribute to this, I would write a lot lol.
Well that's the interesting part is that is essentially how Promoted works. There is a "Promoted" tab for each different tag. When you promote your post it's promoted in up to 5 different tags. I'm not sure how complex it would be to code it based on the tags people normally post in, but that's certainly an interesting idea. Hopefully this idea will gain some traction.
If everything can be discussed, the most important aspect that you should take care of but a lot is:
That the announcements do not cause problems to people, some psychological parameters have to be done for that.
never check promoted, i consider it a joke
Agreed, which is why I'm suggesting what I feel is a better solution.
You should definitely work that angle. This would be a great addition to any of the front ends you mentioned.
Another angle that needs to be attacked is the onboarding process. It's still very difficult to create a Steem wallet, and new users are dropped in here in a fashion not unlike Arkham City. Go play the game, you'll see what I mean. The first person or team to fix that problem will also make a killing.
I agree onboarding is an issue, but it's an issue that people kind of walk themselves into by wanting an account. There are several programs going on right now to fix the onboarding issues, but it seems there isn't much talk in the way of fixing the economic problems.
Lol Arkham City
I need to learn to program, just so I can make a Steem frontend and call it that.
You'll get no argument out of me on that one...
I think the thing you're missing the most out of this is that promotion on an individual front end could be a lucrative source of revenue for the site owners, too. Food for thought...
Agreed, lucrative for the individual site owner, but I'm really focusing on a solution that would benefit the entire platform. If the value of STEEM increases, we all benefit. If front ends start charging to do their own form of promotion, it benefits them for sure, but it doesn't really do shit for the rest of us other than offer a service to give someone else money, which is basically what bidbots do now, so my approach is to really emphasize the importance of burning tokens to counteract inflation and push the price up as they become more scarce.
I mean... we could just force users to burn to post. Without a regenerating resource (like voting power or RC's) that creates scarcity in terms of Steem as a publishing mechanism and adds downside which increases pressure on creators to not spam content.
Although, I understand why such an idea would not be feasible. People are too attached to the token as a means of future value. But I agree that the focus should be on the core economic mechanics of the protocol until the protocol can prove that it can sustain itself and lead to model where organic growth can happen without needing the price to go up to drive that growth to begin with.
That's an option, but realistically I think we'd have zero userbase if we tried that. I mean using steemit and getting an account is already hard enough, if we added on "by the way you need to pay to actually do anything on the platform" we'd be probably be laughed at more than people already do when they talk about STEEM outside of our echo chamber here. Resource credits makes sense to me as it put some kind of incentive in place to encourage people to actually own tokens, which previously there really wasn't much of one. If we look at @steemmonsters for example, it's clearly the most financially successful dApp on our platform and I think it's obvious that the burn mechanism plays a huge part in that. Every time someone combines a card there's one less in existence. Creating an optional and voluntary way for people to consume tokens (through something like post promotion) is something that we are fundamentally lacking. As is the only incentive to really own STEEM is to have resource credits for posting and voting/flagging, but the incentive behind that is to essentially earn STEEM or SBD, which to most people implies earning it to sell. Honestly I want to find more practical burn mechanisms for this platform.
The way that RCs work, they would eventually achieve the same effect. The only difference between burning a regenerative resource and burning a non-regenerative resource really comes down to:
From what you mentioned above, 3 would definitely be a concern for most users. But conversely, the RC model is biased unevenly against smaller staked users in that it is easier to expend regenerative resources when one owns more, whereas everyone would pay the same penalty where stake is put on the table. Again, I wouldn't expect such an idea to gain any popular support, but I think its better to think outside the box, then to do nothing at this point.
How about replacing the promote post with a voting bot which is integrated to the blockchain?
Posted using Partiko Android
This post is essentially what that looks like. It would make absolutely no sense for the blockchain to actually give you a vote, because the blockchain is what distributes the reward pool. Imagine if you walked up to the Federal Reserve and said "I'm going to give you 5 USD, print me out 10 USD please." (Aside from the obvious fact that it does print money) The fundamental reason most of us want blockchain and to get away from that system is there is no predefined and controlled caps on production.
So essentially, what I'm getting at here is that what I described in the post is 100% what a blockchain based tool for "self promotion" looks like. The point of bid bots is allegedly for self promotion after all, if the only reason people are using them is to try to make money, I'd rather get rid of all of them and just open casinos on the blockchain.
I believe this was suggested many times but steemit inc. are just not interested in improving the steemit frontend in any way.
Thanks for the git pull request tho, maybe they will at least take a look?
!tipuvote 5
It would be awesome if we could see it implemented on the "flagship" site. Ultimately nothing is stopping the other, arguably better, front ends from just taking the idea and running with it. Hopefully we'll see some smart burn mechanisms implemented on the platform in the future. Thanks for the tip!
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