I recently joined Steemit as a lay person whose is interested in learning more about cryptocurrencies. What was unusual about Steemit, and also a selling point for me, was that users would be rewarded for participating the the online community. Participation is writing like posts (like this one), commenting on posts, up voting posts and so forth.
I've been watching the boards for a bit, and I am wondering whether this gamification tactic is a good idea. On one hand, I think rewarding participation can be beneficial. It should encourage new content that is user driven, it should encourage more user participation, and it should encourage a richer, community experience. On the flip side, what I have experienced is that it is very difficult to sift through all the stories to find something rich, though-provoking, and stimulating. This negative experience is not a result of the people, but about what I think is the desire to min-max the system. Users are producing a great deal of posts, but not necessarily of good quality. This makes it very difficult for a user like to me to find articles that are interesting that I want to engage with.
I am wondering if there are ways to improve the information that is posted. For example, users should be penalised if they plagiarise posts from other websites. Using 'trending' as a marker of better quality posts is not helpful enough - trending posts can be a result of users upvoting anything in order to gain credits. Perhaps a more useful way to determine post value is how many posts are shared of site though twitter or facebook, rather than just being contained within the steemit environment. A third way could be the interaction between the post author and fellow commentors on the original post. This interaction should be evaluated based on length of comment, number of interactions/replies to a comment, and (MAYBE!) with a machine learning algorithm the language in the post could be evaluated to determine whether it relates to the original pot (a simpler solution is that the community and the author vote on whether the comment is relevant/useful/helpful/adds value to the original post). For example, it would not be useful if someone posted a McDonald's menu as a comment here, even it looks like this 'comment' looks like an interaction.
So what do you think? What have been your honest experiences on this site? How can this be improved upon?
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