Everybody here loves steemit, for obvious reasons. However, we are still a very, very small minority and what is needed is to have hundreds, or even thousands or speciality categories. I know bikini model photoshoots are fairly popular, but also subject to a lot of competition from existing channels.
I havent done the market research on the best categories to target, but my guess is that there are a few dozen key categories that appeal to high intelligence demographic, but are not so nerdy as to be niche. Categories like poker, day trading, high end autos, etc. By focusing on non-nerdy high intelligence categories, the hope is to recruit high-intelligence steemit users that have a broad view on the world.
Assuming we have identified a specific category, then existing online audience for that category can be targeted and encouraged to make a steemit post. However, there needs to be immediate positive feedback as a $1.34 reward isnt going to "wow" many people into becoming active. We have a finite amount of whale vote ammunition to recruit, so for each category it would need to have enough whale support to make sure that a critical mass of active posters for the new category are obtained.
Once a new category is established, it would be nice if there was a category fund that can act as a virtual whale for that category. I can think of automated ways where if enough high reputation accounts are upvoting a post in a specific category, the virtual whale upvotes. This automation would put the power in the hands of the dolphins and relieve the whales from having to work 24/7. Also by the whales being less active, their stake is gradually diluted, which helps distribution.
Where do the funds for the virtual whales come from? Well there is a giant amount in the steemit holding account and that can just be divided across the active categories. It will be a dwindling supply over the years, but we only need to jump start and nurture the speciality categories until it dominates in its space.
However I have no idea how we can make such a giant change to the system. I can write the virtual whale bot code, but getting the steem allocated for it is up to the big whales. Still, it would just take a handful of dolphin volunteers and a few whales to manually jump start a new speciality category.
Please comment here if you are interested in helping. First step is to identify the best category for the experiment. Then hopefully we can get a few whales to agree to monitor and upvote in that category. Assuming this works and each category gets steemit an additional ~1000 active posters in a speciality community and we do this 100x, this becomes an insurmountable obstacle for anybody else.
James
If you want to support me, just upvote my crypto777 witness account #37 on https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Great idea. I made a similar suggestion a couple of weeks back. I hope this initiative takes off. I'll be interested in helping in any way I can.
thanks! can you volunteer to organize the other volunteers? We need somebody that others can ask about how best they can help, for that we need a global map of who is doing what.
I'm interested in helping out the trading sub-category. I think I've almost reached the limits of the value I can offer around the Steemit economics. I've also had lots of chats on rocket.chat with some of the traders here and other dolphins.
That's the next area I'll be focusing on. and will be discussing it with anyone I know may be interested.
If anyone reading this is interested hit me up on rocket and hopefully we can all band together and create a group chat.
great! we can just start with #trading and a trading channel in the chat for the trading dolphins to coordinate. Then we need a few whales to sign on to daily upvote the best in the #trading tag. Just this will make sure that all quality posts in trading will get a better than minimum wage payout. And trading is definitely a great category to dominate!
I nominate @wingz as lead dolphin in the #trading category. Hopefully you can recruit other dolphins to be a curation team so we can make it easy for the #trading whale(s)
@jl777
I initially started posting in the #trading channel, but I didn't get much of a response. I'd be willing to try again, though.
@jl777 this is a great idea as it will create some distribution throughout the tags instead of the top loaded state we currently have. I post to both money & investments with trading related material so will contribute to #trading if it's a available tag.
Its funny, before I found steemit I started a trading sub /r/EthTradeClub where I used to tip Eth for content. This is a great find for me as I love trading and talking about my trading setups. I would to help a trading sub here but I am still trying to figure out how everything works here.
-Epic
welcome!
in the steemit chat the #trading channel is where we are chatting about this
I very much like the idea of sub-categories. Communities would form around common interests. This solves a huge problem of interest based discovery. It also helps with scalability quite a bit.
Here is another potential approach I've been thinking about:
This model would require a change in how the rewards pooling is done, to ensure a fair distribution of rewards between communities . Perhaps each community would have its own rewards pool, proportional to the size of the the community and total SP of its participants.
If a person is a member of multiple communities, their SP influence and rewards are split between all communities that the member participates in, proportional to their SP pool sizes.
Human decisions are key, see my response above about registered dolphin curators. I dont think there is too much change needed to the system. Just getting the unused steemit's voting power is all that is needed. the rest can be done via overlay to the existing system
The rewards segregation based on community size (or better yet its cumulative SP) would make the rewards fair, while maintaining the difficulty vs reward ratio equalized across the platform.
Unfortunately, it would also cap the max a post can earn to the communities rewards power.
Perhaps I am thinking too ahead of the time, I see this more applicable to when Steemit has millions of members.
So in the current stage, I think your solution with dolphin curators voting on steemit's SP might be a lot more practical.
I agree that ultimately something more like your idea is good. but one step at a time, minimal changes to the existing system that solves the current obstacle. Iterate and we dominate. Stagnate and ...
Hi @jl777, I agree totally with what you are proposing. I am actually writing a series on using the principles of graph theory to expand the Steemit network. The key idea is, in fact, that we need to create new spokes of the network that become specialist hubs, rather than simply expanding the central core.
The danger is that Steemit gets stuck in a local minima: a Steemit-dominated front page, with writers writing stories targeted at getting on a Steemit-dominated front page. Avoiding that requires some long-term thinking, and perhaps introducing bounties for certain topics, scaling vote weights down for large holders and popular tags etc. It's a very hard, and interesting, problem but for anyone who wants Steemit to pull in and retain users from outside the crypto bubble, it will need to be addressed.
my conclusion exactly.
But it wont require much changes, mostly an overlay that organizes competent dolphins in each category. Once that is in place, then a bot can do an MofN aggregation of the human decision and then release the allocated SP for that category. We have #trading as the first identified category that fits this strategy and @wingz as lead.
So the process is to identify a category, find a specific person to lead it, which means to find other curators with expertise in that category. Once this is in place, then at first whales to manually upvote the identified content, but that can easily be automated with a bot,so the only internals change would be to allocate the unused steemit account's voting power, which has plenty to fund dozens of speciality categories
eventually the witness system can be used for the category curators and the entire process can be automated, even new category creation so that it remains decentralized
That sounds good. I don't have the voting power, but to point people in the right direction, I'd definitely be willing to do some manual curation around #fiction and #writing (the things I do for fun) and the more technical topics (that I do for work). Those haven't really settled around a hashtag yet - but I guess it would be things like #mathematics #programming etc.
since this is purely volunteer effort now, our resources are limited. #trading is the first test category we are doing this with, so any help you can to recruit more people to get #trading established would be great. thanks!
I think politics will also have overlap with existing user base everyone has an opinion and we can target readers of politico thehill dailykos 538 red state power line hotair etc. some insiders will likely post here where they make money rather than leak to the other sites
I would be interested in helping in any way I can, although we do need to identify what niches would be good to go after. My own personal interests include psychology, philosophy, science, technology and alternative culture, but I tend to easily switch.
Great! #trading seems like a no-brainer as it clearly has high value and if we can dominate that category it has the effect of bringing in a lot of external capital into steemit. there is #trading in chat and the next step for #trading category is to get enough knowledgable dolphins to make sure any and all good posts are identified for whale upvotes
Well I tried doing a live finance blog today, and apart from one legit response, I just got a bunch of people saying "upvoted" and earnings of 41 cents for several hours work!
I just don't think there is demand for anything other than articles about steemit.
That is what I am trying to change. The idea is to have $X thousand dollars per day of awards per category. So if your article was in the Top N in that category, you would get a share of the overall pool for that category
and ants.
More seriously, much of this will just have to wait for better platform features, especially following. When a blogger can gain a following they can expect consistent upvotes on every post (unless they fail to deliver value and lose the following). Right now there is no organization to any of it, and much of what happens is just random. The ants post got launched because I upvoted it to remove what I felt was undeserved negative reputation (I thought the post itself was decent too, but nothing special).
It is impossible to make a credible proposal to fix what is broken when what is (allegedly) broken isn't even built yet.
You are apparently not thinking about the game theory of how this can encourage Sybil attacking it for gains. There is a reason the whales are given control with a quadratic weighting, and it is because otherwise all sorts of ways to game the voting system are enabled.
It isn't going to be so easy to fix Steem's voting and ranking algorithms, because it is a fundamental problem.
the elected curators upvotes are just tallied, so not sure how that can be sybil attacked. a sybil(s) would need to be elected as a specialist curator. It is more a way to separate the voting power from the voting decision.
Given that a majority of specialist curators need to upvote for the virtual whale upvote, what attack vector is there?
The assumption is that any sybil curator that somehow gets elected would be detected and unelected. Clearly if the specialist curators are all infested with sybils it wont work, that is why I said that the curators need to be known accounts with knowledge of the speciality. How can a sybil convince the community they are knowledgeable about a topic and continuously pass scrutiny by the other specialist curators that they are not some sybil?
If by “elected curators” you mean what you wrote previously “if enough high reputation accounts are upvoting a post in a specific category, the virtual whale upvotes”, then it means one only needs attain the threshold of upvotes (reputation) with their accounts and use this to influence rewards. Remember voting reward is non-linear, so if you can mount a swarm attack that mobilizes the whales' voting power (per your suggestion to apply their voting power algorithmically), then you can cheat the system. And if you make the weighting algorithm non-linear, then the entire system is ruined because everyone has an incentive to vote for themselves.
if you read the discussion the process is clarified. let us use #trading as a specific example. We would find half a dozen people (regardless of how much SP they have) that are knowledgable about trading to be the specialist curators. The exact method of how they are selected is not finalized and certainly subject to a continuous review as it is quite important.
So let us assume there are N such specialist curators. Now a majority of these curators need to upvote a post with a #trading tag for it to trigger the autowhale upvote.
People are involved in the entire process, the only thing automated is tabulating the specialist curator's votes and trigger the autowhale vote. Presumably if a sybil account can fool the community that it is knowledgeable about #trading and it is making votes consistent with such a person, then I claim there is actually no difference between that sybil and a real person, hence there isnt a valid sybil attack as the result is the same.
Please comment on what is proposed, not what you assume is proposed.
I do not see any sybil attack, short of an AI that can pass an ongoing Turing test
I commented on what was proposed in the blog post. I didn't read your comments after you made the blog post.
This seems to be different than what you proposed in the blog post. When you wrote “reputation” in the blog post, it presumably means the reputation system recently implemented which is that number in parenthesis next to our username which is tabulated from vote history not elections.
Okay so now you morphed (or clarified) your proposal to elections of delegates who will control (some portion of) the whales' voting in the instances the majority of them (a quorum) agree.
There are some issues with this:
Radically improving relevance will be a major breakthrough. I don't think your proposal will be that significant of an improvement because it lacks algorithmic power to develop emergent phenomena in relevance and like-mindedness, although it might spread rewards around a little bit better (unless #1 is entirely gamed as it is always is in politics due to the Iron of Political Economics and the power-law distribution of wealth).
specialist curators will need to respond to questions about their votes (within reason) so we can make sure it is not a bot, ie. it can read, understand and respond like a human.
If the sybils that are run by an attacker somehow gets the majority of the specialist curator spots, then it would be up to the community to escalate things to a higher level review of voting pattern. Since all the votes are public, we can see what posts that should have gotten votes didnt and which ones that shouldnt have did. Given that information, and a removal process of a bad curator, I think any damage will be time limited
replying to your other reply.
The aim for my plan is not to make spontaneous identification of new cateogories, but rather to allow the community to select specific high value specialist categories, fund it, and create a reasonable enhancement to posts in that category.
I have not specifically stated as I thought it was clear, but all posts in the specialist categories still go into the main steemit system and can get the upvotes via the normal method. The problem I am trying to solve is where new users arrive all excited, spend a lot of time creating valuable content and get $1.39, feel disappointed and leave. This robs the community of a source of good content and increases the dropout rate, both are problems that need to be fixed without needing to conflate other problems that also need to be fixed onto this one.
By having dozens or hundreds of specialist categories where a good post has its revenues enhanced via whatever flawed political process, is still better than $1.39 for a high value content
Steemit is evolving and specialization and professionalization takes place. I call it micro magazines, that will emerge now, but arguments are the same: https://steemit.com/steemit/@capitalism/captalism-1-will-steemit-become-a-platform-for-100-000-micro-magazines
yes, we both come to same conclusion. I am trying to bring together the different pieces that are needed, and so far we are getting volunteers and good visibility and whale votes for this post, so it is very hopeful that we can get this process tested and working
It seems both of us are really steemit centric in our posts. Time to move on to other topics as well. Read this post of @steemed, who is a well know steem patron: https://steemit.com/steem/@steemed/removing-authors-of-steem-posts
I think this is first and foremost a UI issue. We need better community building tools. Right now Steem is just one big community where everything is visible to everybody. That can't work in the long run – and I'd say it doesn't work even now, we are too big to be one unified community.
What I want to see is some way of building communities where users don't have to care what is happening in the rest of the blockchain. They see only posts and comments from their own community members. That is the only way Steem can create an environment for flourishing communities.
Steem frontpage is a real problem currently. It shows everything to everybody, even when the posts are written in a language that user doesn't understand. Either the trending-algorithm has to be changed or the whole frontpage has to be rebuild.
When everything is shown for everybody, something really important or cool can be missed. For example well known AI-researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky made a few great posts couple of days ago but almost nobody did notice them. We need a way for good writers to find easily a community where they can share their texts, to be seen and get feedback. Now this system is just a one big mess.
filtering by tags and customized view in UI is certainly one part of the solution, but if speciality content writers are getting $1.23 per post, it wont make sense for them as they can probably get more advertising revenues on their own blog site.
Now that steemit.com is open source, one thing that can be done is a new site created for each category, so the front page would show content catering to that demographic.
We have the tools already, so I guess one action item is to create a website with a #trading-centric view as #trading is one of the key speciality categories.
Hopefully we can get a volunteer to fork the steemit.com site and make the required changes for this
I don't think it's really that difficult to do it on Steemit.com. It has to be done someday anyway, this site will become useless when we have ten times more active users here if it stays in it's current form.
Speciality content producers will get paid once we have some way for them to be seen (by people who want to see them). Now it's pretty much impossible for an unknown noob to get paid. It's just pure luck if they manage to get to the frontpage and earn big money because of that.
hence my proposal
I can offer design services if you want. I would love to help the project. I wrote something along your line of thought here https://steemit.com/steemit/@kyriacos/3-issues-with-steemit-no-one-talks-about
With the current compounding of SP there will be hundreds of dolphins and dozens of whales within a year, each of whom will presumably curate a niche that interests them. Within two years there will be thousands of dolphins and hundreds of whales curating Reddits and subreddits. It's going to take some time to build a user base and distribute STEEM... Steemit is going to grow into everything people are envisioning and much, much more.
Why leave to chance what can be controlled. Rifle shots vs shotgun approach.
While I agree dolphins will appear by the hundreds and thousands, I disagree about whales. The barriers to becoming a whale are quite large and hard to surmount, unless the existing whales become dormant. That is the only way that their proportional stake in VESTS decreases. but if the whale is inactive, the money creation of his stake is inactive.
Most everybody has seen the problem of content non-specialization. upvoting steemit posts on steemit can only get so far, maybe we already reached how far that alone gets.
So lets fix this. We have the power to get everything in place, other than the voting power. And my hope is that once the infrastructure is in place, the whales will agree to either actively help by upvoting (manually or via bot that I can write for this) or to unleash the steemit accounts vast voting power. There is no name for that beast, it is not a whale or megawhale, but the entire ocean. And currently it is sleeping
The whale barrier might be lower than we think should STEEM go on a bull run - with the amount of STEEM being locked up in SP the float is small and the STEEM market is very, very tight. A run of 10x or 100x in market cap is completely possible if not probable over the next two years. There may be a lot of $10 - $100 votes to be had in the near future.
All that said, I think your idea is awesome and more categories with attendant whales would definitely bring in more talent and content. I'm surprised we aren't seeing some of the newly minted travel/photog dolphins and whales doing exactly what you are suggesting in the travel/intro sections. The whales dumped a huge amount of STEEM/SP/SD on a few of these (mostly) girls but I'm not yet seeing consistent upvoting by the pod.
higher STEEM price does not affect each whale's percentage of VESTS. Only their relative inactivity vs dolphins does. That is the math. And if whales are inactive, then the average awards will go down 90%+...
Also, without a more formalized system in place and without even any agreement as to the responsibility for the newly created travel dolphins, there is no assurance of continued success. That being said the "photography" tag is still consistently at the top. Realistically a single whale is still more influential than all the travel dolphinettes combined
Based on mathematical analysis of steemit, this is my recommendation to create feedbacks using the math to get hundreds or even thousands of speciality categories with the best content of anywhere else, that just happens to pay enough for a critical mass of authors in each category
like the old liquidity points system, if you take out the human factor the end result is just whatever the optimal math solution is
We must be focused. Trading is a good place to start. Also politics economics finance technology should have overlap. Nothing too general. It's much better to have some huge winners in adjacent markets than scatter shot content all over the map. That dilutes everyone. It's important the users see multiple categories that interest them with the best content on the web rather than one or two good post that rival other sources and a bunch of subpar material Focus on the customer. Focus on dominating categories not just checking a box that say we have that too.
This is a Great Idea do update on this
I agree that we need more content variety here. Not so sure on the auto bot whale idea though. That seems to lean toward a more consoled centralized blog. A decentralized model where the curators bring the more popular subject higher into the topic lists is good. More topics in general will come over time as we attract the wider variety of people. By the way love to see you on steem J
the autowhale would just be monitoring a set of registered dolphins for each category. Think of it as a multisig for upvoting. If MofN curator dolphins for that category upvote, it automatically releases the virtual whale's upvote. So it is automation, but really just implementing a tally of human decisions. So for each speciality category there would need to be a way for the official curators to be registered, probably just a similar way to witnesses as that mechanism already exists.
I am advocating to be proactive to make the best categories come to us, rather than rely on chance
I really like this idea of kickstarting network spread and also would be happy to help in any way I can!
I think going after categories that play well in other non-monetized social arenas are the way to go. I look at
gaming, for instance, see the copious amounts of work people put into their posts, and think it wouldn't take much convincing for many to move their work here.Also, for reference and research, here is a list of the current top subreddits and a SEO guide written about two years back that separated out social categories on reddit by amount of subscribers and posting type (links, blog, etc.).
Looking through both lists, some "high intellect" non-nerdy categories might just be something like
DIY, orpolitics. A wildcard for me was thefitnesscategory. High amount of subscribers, low link sharing, and the largest amount of posts are those that share their fitness stories or their own custom workout plans. Might play very well here.sounds like you will be able to rank the upcoming categories. #trading was an easy one to identify. #gaming also seems to fall in that category. For now we are working on making a cookie cutter process to go from identified category to a self-sustained category, starting with #trading.
Not sure how long it will take to jump start #trading, but it will be a fair amount of research to identify the most effective dozen #categories that will have the most impact.
For now, let's coordinate in #trading in the steemit chat, even for non-#trading things
@jl777 So basically you are looking to do this ( and I am explaining it in simple term as I always do )
thus ADVANTAGES are " smaller management are better management"
CHALLENGES TO ACHIEVE THIS GOAL
yes!
any #tag is automatically spawned, but without content it wont exist. and without people to judge the content it will end up with junk and without enough SP muscle to support this, we wont get the content
as a community we can get pretty much all the pieces done and we are starting with #trading as it seems a very good sub-category. so we need a website that is oriented for this, ie its frontpage is #trading, we need content providers for it, curators, and whale support for the concept in general and specifically to manually upvote #trading so after all the work to get this in place we dont end up with $1 payouts for good content.
Maybe you can help with describing the process that achieves the goal?
I know we havent achieved it yet, but we will, so it would require to be part of the process so it can be documented. Once we have a proven working methodology, then we can get dozens or hundreds going in parallel.
The role of whales will be to honor the dolphin's judgement as to which content deserves upvotes. This separation of powers of upvoting might be heresy, so I recommeded tapping into steemit account's voting power. However there could well be whales who are not having the time to be curating, so a mechanism to lease out their voting power to specific categories would be a nice core feature.
hey , im gonna help you out here
open process for the specialist curators to be elected, using method similar for witnesses. this allows anybody who can convince the community they are competent in the speciality to be a curator. So this is a representative system and it separates upvoting decision from the value of accounts. Assuming we can get X amount of voting power allocated for a category, then which posts gets the share of that is up to the elected curators. There is no dictating that I am proposing, rather the opposite.
Now maybe when there are millions of steemit users, things can be totally freeform, but for now I want to be able to target a specific high value category and then have a proven process that jump starts it. If a category doesnt have whale support, it wont have the big attraction behind it, so the categories that are selected will also need to go through a vetting process. But that I will be able to use the existing methods.
So, the selection of categories: by the community
selection of specialist curators: by the community
selection of posts within a specialist category: by the specialist curators
upvoting: based on MofN approval by the specialist curators
It isnt perfect, but my method is not a bad start. feel free to make improvements
Hi. Please support us on this if you think it is a good idea.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@fogspam/first-advertising-campaign-of-steemit-in-romania-the-best-way-to-make-steemit-viral-just-follow-my-example-more-users-investors
Nice writer @jl777
Edited. Thanks for the explanation in chat. Will help if I can. Have voted for you using cli client (@thecryptofiend2).