Steemit is being abused by people who are gaming the system. I have some improvements to suggest which will improve the quality of Steemit’s content, and bring in more users, and boost the price of Steem.
Comment spam
We want to encourage good authors and discourage spammers. I hate “comment spam”.
When I see it, my only option is to reply along the following lines:
How would I improve it?
Give users more curation options e.g. “How much does the above post cotribute to the debate” Or, “Is the above post useful to other readers?” Or “Does it look like a spam comment?”. Curators should not be penalised for scoring the comment nor should they be rewarded. No bot or self-scoring allowed.
Bots
I am also against most bots. There are a few good ones, like @Cheetah. The vast majority are just there to milk the reward pool at the expense of humans. It would be better if most bots could not participate in the rewards pool. By excluding them from the rewards pool, it would encourage more meaningful human dialog in the comments section.
Some low quality posts have received hundreds of “up-votes”, but only about a dozen page-views. Most of those votes were by bots on the Blockchain. The blogs were never read. That kind of behavior doesn’t encourage the best bloggers to keep posting high quality content.
Quite the opposite, bloggers then go for a higher quantity of articles. Inevitably, much lower-value articles. Popular writers know that they will receive lots of robot upvotes, even if they write a rubbish post. They are incentivised to go for short-term profits instead of high quality. Most Bots do not encourage good quality posts. Some they pretend that they do. Most of them have been created for the sole purpose of milking the reward pool.
How would I improve it? Firstly, remove the rewards from the bots. It would be easy to set up “bot traps” to discover who is a robot. Robots could be prevented from voting with a captcha system. Annoying as it is to humans, a captcha would ensure that only humans judge humans. When Steemit was young, I could see the merit of bots to encourage writers. Now Steemit has enough human curators to not need the robots any more.
In other words, leave the reward pool to be allocated by humans, not robots.
7 Day rule
Another bee in my is the 7 day rule. You only get paid for 7 days after you have written a blog. That just seems wrong.
If I was to write a book, like “Harry Potter”, or “War and Peace”, and it was still selling 20 years from now, I would still be being paid by most publishers. If the publisher were Steemit, I would only be paid for 7 days. It’s not worth the effort. Why would I bother?
I am sure that many aspiring authors avoid Steemit because of the seven-day limit on rewards. I would like to see Steemit include long term material, not just topical posts. I would like to find books and manuals. Unless Steemians can earn rewards for years into the future, why would they write anything long, like a book - e.g. “Idiots Guide to Steemit”.
I know a writer of short children’s stories. She gets royalties on her books for years after they have been written. There is no incentive to publish them on Steemit.
How would I solve this?
Simply scrap the 7 day rule in favour of a longer period. Perhaps authors could “buy” a longer period of several years. Personally, I would prefer it to be free for everyone and for at least 10 years. Good books would then be published on Steemit instead of paper.
Hello friend here are 2 in the morning and not asleep we were watching a movie and now is that I go to sleep, check my blog and I saw your post, I like to read it always with good information. thank you and we'll talk in 6 hours, I'll try to sleep. regards
Good on you for this post.
They ignore these posts though.
If anything... them bloody bots! That must go!
That should be seen as nothing but an embarrassment.
Screams out... GREED.
How could steemit become mainstream like that?
Or, is that the point... Whale Feeding Zone Only.
I gotta agree on the amounts of bots that I have seen on Steemit. I wonder if there is any moderator work ongoing in Steem as well. I understand that the Steemit build seems to be busy working on another project at the moment, I’m sure if the community could help they will be more than willing to do so. One more point, I find the design of the interface and categorizing of tags quite outdated and unstylish. It would be much better if they could put some effort into beautifying this Baby up as well.
Agreed on all points. Bots are not really doing much. If we can add a great search/discover feature, that would be great. The upvote/resteem bots are really ruining the platform. If you can simply buy upvote+resteem why bother with quality. That's a really bad incentive. Unless the bots can bring more money than they ask for (1 SBD for upvote+resteem) nobody would use the bots. What you end up with is people gaming the system.
That's not really the worst part. The good content creators will be forced to use bots as that's the only way they can gain visibility when they start out on steemit. This turns to a death spiral.
The main selling point of steemit is the quality content. That's why I'm here. I love the community. I love reading/discovering/learning stuff on steemit. But bots don't contribute much.
Dash is my #1 currency coin. The thing I love the most about it how well the incentives are set. (https://www.dashforcenews.com/6-ways-dash-uses-economics-solve-technical-problems/) If you set the incentives you can get the outcome without any centralized control. People will control themselves into doing what's best for them. If you screw up the incentives you are doomed.
Excellent proposal I liked the part of lengthening the reward time, I need to get many SBD to replace my dive equipment in the future. I would like my effort underwater to be more valued, I am not very good writer, but I make the effort to show the secrets that the aceano hides.
The seven day rule is absolutely a major drag on quality posts.... I am not well known but it doesn't mean I cannot write something beautiful. Personally, I know I do. I know that if I put out the great amount of effort and go in detail as I wish I could it would take a long time. I write carefully, I think carefully. With my base (basically nonexistent) I would get few eyes over 7 days, even with effort. If I was able to promote it over time, refer back to it, maybe add it to my other websites, it would be worth the effort for QUALITY which is what I thought STEEMIT was supposed to be geared towards. Now took a long break from steemit when realizing I'd have to change my game and produce quick repeating posts.....YUCK
There are also many other small technical things that can easily be fixed.
I think a little twist like that will make the community stronger
Some good points brought up in your post. Poor quality posts are being made everyday so it takes time for me to browse and read quality posts. Regarding the 7 day rule, I think you still get points after each week if that post is read at any time in the future.
Honestly, I have the same issue. It is like wasting my time open up 10 articles to find only 1 or 2 good posts that are actually worth to read. I seriously believe that if people want to make serious money from Steemit, they may as well just stop posting poor quality as it will seriously damage the brand instead of creating more value. One last comment, I think there is simply too many posts regarding cryptocurrency out there and most of them don't offer much helpful insight .
Hello, I'm late to comment on this post but I hope you read it.
Here are my thoughts on your 3 ways.
I did not even know that there was a seven-day limit to getting paid on your work. That seems very out of sync with the spirit of royalties and intellectual property.
It would seem to incentivise disposable news posting.
Quite surprising.
Hi ...I am new here. I just read your post, thanks for the guide. I found it really useful to begin here in Steemit.
I wrote a post a couple of days ago regarding this issue, and the possible future consequences.
Wealth inequality - a very important issue that is overlooked (in relation to steemit, I mean) and may well be the demise of this platform, (with its current structure.)
nice post
https://steemit.com/blog/@lucylin/a-perspective-of-things-to-come-on-steemit-maybe
Thanks to both of you for the comments @lucylin and @sqamemal. On the question of curation, I saw an interesting idea. No vote is confirmed, up or down unless a second curator confirms the first curator’s vote.
On the question of the “good” bots, vs the destructive bots, I think this has to be a mixture of solutions. Maybe curator voting for or against the use of certain bots, and no monetary reward for bot posts.
You bring up a lot of great points that I think a lot of us feel should be addressed.
There has to be a better design to improve minnow visibility without having to use bots.
Do you (or anyone else reading this comment) know if Steemit team has feedback account where they respond to people with similar criticisms?
Maybe similar to the White House petition where they are forced to respond?
I think getting their attention and getting ideas to them is what everyone should be focused on.
I totally agree, bots should be removed from Steemit in order to promote organic growth. If Steemit does not do anything about it, the pool of bots will just continue to grow which can prove to be disastrous for the future of the site. Thus, a voting system could be introduced to remove suspicious botting activities.
Cheers,
Coinprofessor
I totally agree, bots should be removed from Steemit in order to promote organic growth. If Steemit does not do anything about it, the pool of bots will just continue to grow which can prove to be disastrous for the future of the site. Thus, a voting system could be introduced to remove suspicious botting activities.
Cheers,
Coinprofessor