The rewards, of course :)
You're spot on - we need to curate responsibly, as a community. We should stop mindlessly voting on just our friends and ourselves, and on the trending posts. Besides, that's a sure fire way to kill off all your curation rewards.
The community must be educated to vote on great, undiscovered content and promote them. There's a significant incentive in the curation rewards system that favours voting on such content versus posts that are already trending.
Despite a largely positive HF19, I'm afraid after HF19 I see a lot of engaged curators with large SP holdings (or delegated) give out 10%-25% for others, while saving 100% for themselves and their friends/colluders. That's not the desired behaviour of the voting power rate change. This should be called out as questionable behaviour.
Everyone needs to read these comments from @liberosist!
Excellent post, I sadly missed reading it! Definitely agree with you. I do think it will take a large mindset overhaul, as the majority of the early adopters are all crypto nuts, and we love our crypto news... I'm guilty of following and voting for this stuff because it's presently valuable to me (e.g., I would have completely missed the byteballs airdrop if it wasn't for @kingscrown; he's always on the ball with crypto info.)
This is interesting, and I'm already guilty of saving 100% votes (e.g. for @steemcleaners logs). I have a strong feeling this will become the norm. It makes me curious; how much will people now consider a post to be "already too valuable" and not vote on it. In this case, not voting for oneself may end up with the same reward at the end of the day, as more people might be inclined to increase the reward, instead of the power user increasing it themselves.
We opened a whole can of worms with this hardfork, should be interesting to see it play out.
For the longest time, I was partial to the view that this is a free open market and everyone should do as they please. Of course, I still believe that, but I've come around to the notion that there should be accountability and the players should act in the best interests of the community rather than their own.
We have a real shot at making this place special, but I'm afraid we are curating sub-optimally right now. It is about time the top stakeholders of the platform took responsibility. Stop delegating SP to people you like, stop voting on your friends, start voting for authors that have a chance of attracting the mainstream. It's in the best interests of the community and the stakeholders themselves. I can promise you if the Trending page was replaced by engaging content the mainstream audience can enjoy, this network has a real chance at hitting dozens of millions of users in short order. Stakeholders stand to gain millions of dollars, if only they stop being myopic and look at the bigger picture.
I have limited reach, few would ever read my opinion. My hope is influencers like yourself can start a serious and involved discussion on the matter. I would greatly appreciate it.
There's the free market, and then there's cutting down fruit trees for firewood. If somebody with a $10,000 stake can upvote their own posts and comments to something like $700 a week, 7% per week!, there's no way that the current economy can be sustainable. Maybe a couple of months of that, and then we go back to $0.02, and the $10000 turns into $1000, against the trend of the whole crypto market, and everybody will cry foul.
This upvoting of one's own comments is not stimulating interaction, and it's in bad taste. It always was lame, now it's completely over the top.
Yeah, definitely see your point. Stakeholders being myopic is exactly the tragedy of the commons that I often talk about.
I have always wanted there to be a separate trending page on steemit: a front facing one with normal blogs, and a
circlejerkinternal trending page. My post here would fit in the latter. Perhaps communities, when they arrive, can help this this kind of separation.I think you have a bigger reach than you think. I personally regard your opinion extremely highly due to all the effort you have put in this platform, and I know I am not the only one. As for my influence, I still struggle to get people to pay attention to plagiarism. :p
If you have ideas to push this forward, you'll have my support for sure.
Precisely, communities should solve this issue, but it would also require the voters to act responsibly. There'll no longer be an excuse of "Oh, this is important, it must be trending!", but the voters still have to learn to vote on valuable posts that'll attract users to the network.
Top authors can also disable curation rewards on their posts to disincentivize vote piling. That seems like an altruistic act, but most top authors are holding Steem/Power that stands to gain value if they help reshape the Trending page.
I'm aware some people are listening to me, but at the end of the day I prefer working behind the scenes. I don't have any political skills and don't intend to learn. I don't really have any ideas on how to push this forward, but that's where I'm counting on influencers and witnesses. As the abit experiment proves, the community has the power to unite. If a couple of influential people got together and made a pact to not vote on circlejerk posts, pull back delegations to irresponsible curators, look to vote on new authors, I'm sure it'll happen. It's as simple as someone taking the initiative and making it happen.
That someone isn't going to be me :)
Hey liberosist, I'm curious if you know of anybody who'd be interested in leasing out their SP for a small fee. It would be for a voting application that I'm building which will target comments specifically, and I'd strongly commit to no self-voting or anything like that.
I'm guessing that everybody you know who has spare SP has already delegated it to @curie or some such, but I thought I'd ask anyway.
Funny, I'm looking to lease out SP too. Your best bet would be @neoxian. Come find me on Steemit.chat (http for now, not s) or Discord liberosist#1871.
Ah, that's why I can't access Steemite chat.
I actually found someone for the time being...
Many good points on this comment @liberosist. I've been observing this phenomenon that you point out from the first day. I've been here on steemit basically around the same time as you and @anyx (11 months ago) however, look the distinct results in the value of my account and wallet.
I am stuck with a Rep53.. well, since ever. And my SP does not even reach the 100 mark so far after 11 months of engagement. Consequently, I have not yet even been able to earn me the vote slider either. So go figure!!
I've already published a good lot of posts specifically addressed to this pernicious problem of blind upvoters & mindless bots. Just the same as with the curators who simply vote for their own interests and gains without first reading the content from top to bottom on the posts they are voting up.
I've been waiting patiently backstage for some logical and positive changes on this platform in order to improve and enhance true live engagement and solidarity between steemians. Where the sense of creating community, collaboration and healthy common growth be the first goal and slogan. But I think that there are still many others hard forks and changes ahead to reach that point. Unfortunately!!
Finally, and to make this comment short. I would like to shamelessly draw your attention towards an article that I would appreciate some support, diffusion and promotion by both of you. I think this is for a good cause that unfortunately gone undiscovered & unnoticed by the community and also highly underrated and under-valued.
I invite you to read the post and hopefully both of you feel gratified with the probable curation rewards from this post and also look gorgeous inside and out for the next steemit's photography.
Cheers! :)
You joined at the same time as us, sure, but it looks like you only started being active when the price and subsequently blogging difficulty went us. Many of us have stuck with Steem and believed in it through the hard times. When the price hit $0.10 virtually everyone left. There were only a few hundred of us who stuck around, and we gained large followers and were rewarded a significant portion of the reward pool. That went on for nearly 6 months before Steem started growing again. The reward pool is the same in terms of Steem Power rewarded, and it was really easy to get to the Trending page. Now the blogging difficulty and competition is way up, it's much harder to get the same kind of attention.
It's the same as mining difficulty, really. Those who were early to Bitcoin and Ethereum mining could make accumulate thousands of coins. At they time they were worthless, but if you were patient, you would be a millionaire now.
The lesson to learn is - Be patient, be persistent, be early. Keep engaging with the community, if your content is good you'll eventually get some attention. All the best!
its also about finding it early which can be done to luck and then taking action