Artwork on the buildings in Santana Row, California. (Photo by me.)
Been a while since my last update due to school and personal reasons, but with the upcoming hardfork 15, the new changes to the economy being proposed, and quickly coded, I felt now was a good time to weigh in on the past few weeks. Although I haven't been commenting or posting here much, I have been active in steemit.chat as well as discussions with witnesses and other parties!
1. Accomplished the past weeks:
- SBD Price Feed: Along with the suggestions by @smooth and others, I have upped my vote for the interest rate of SBD to 15%. This will hopefully garner more confidence in SBD and help maintain the peg. I am currently maintaining my price feed (conversion) bias at 13% for now, but this will have to be re-evaluated shortly with the upcoming changes. Along with many other people converting to reduce the SBD debt, I converted about 2,000 SBD at a loss these last weeks. This showed me that the bias is still necessary.
- I still watch @cheetah as much as possible. It's becoming clear to me that despite changes in messages, the community perception of her has not and will likely not change. It has never been a 'plagiarism bot', but unfortunately this connotation remains. I made a comment about this recently, which I think is worth a read:
In regards to cheetah being a "post killer", it does have a certain connotation when the comment is seen. However I have also noticed most readers are smart enough to realize when cheetah is being a bit redundant, and I see plenty of posts where cheetah is ignored because readers are smart! (and thinking that readers are too dumb to make their own decision on voting for a post is kinda presumptuous...)
However, there's also some bias that goes into this. In general, we have gotten the steemit community to realize that copy-pasting is not really adding value. As such, posts that contain a large fraction of copy-paste compared to original work, tend to do poorly naturally, whether or not cheetah made a comment.
- As usual, I participated as a @steemcleaners member. Note that the payouts for last week are delayed, but rest assured, everything is still counted and we will be issuing two weeks worth soon.
- I upgraded my witness to the bugfix hardfork, steem v0.15.0.
2. Upcoming projects/goals:
- The biggest upcoming thing is STEEMFEST! I can't wait to meet people there. My flight is in two days, and I can't be more excited!
- Right after Steemfest I will be attending another conference, Supercomputing. So I will likely be busy for while, but I promise I'm still alive. :)
- I need to spend some time with my dev work -- one major thing to do is teach @cheetah Russian and export him to golos.
3. Thoughts from the past weeks:
With all the massive changes being discussed to the overhauling the steemit economy, I feel like now is a good time for me to weigh in. In general, I think the changes are extremely positive to improve the overall economy. Let me break it into ideas and my thoughts:
- Changing the power down rate to 3 months (as opposed to 2 years): This is an extremely positive change that I could not be more happy about. One of my major concerns about the network is the fact that many large stakeholders were selling large quantities of steem without removing their status as the largest stakeholders. We need the ability to perform wealth redistribution. Yes, this may cause waves in the price, but the final outcome will be worth it in my mind: the constant sell pressure under the current system has not redistributed wealth. We still have the exact same set of large stakeholders.
- Reduction of inflation: Also positive. Making the regular steem token into a viable currency in itself is much better than having it as an onboarding mechanism.
- Increase of back up and mining witness pay: I'm a bit mixed on this change -- the back up pay I can agree with for sure, but the mining pay I am still concerned about. If/when the POW moves to equihash, I will reconsider how I feel about this.
- Reduction of witness pay: In my mind, this is intended to restructure the system such that witnesses are more being paid for the block production duties, rather than as 'employees of the steem blockchain' which is what I currently see them as. This change devalues the role of a witness, in a way. I have mixed feelings on this, as I know some witnesses are only after the profit, but on the other hand, a large amount are focusing really hard on improving the platform. My funding for @steemcleaners is coming from witness pay, and if this is cut, we will have to rethink our strategy.
- Price feed / conversion from 7 days to 3.5 days: Sure, why not! The math doesn't change much, but this gives some more confidence to converters.
All in all, the changes are quite positive, but they are coming quite quick. Lets not get ahead of ourselves! There is some excellent discussion in the comment sections of the posts ( @laonie, @smooth, @arhag, and others, made some excellent points), and I think these need to be thought of in depth before the changes are accepted.
Okay, enough about economic changes. I want to jump in with some thoughts about the epidemic of 'vote monetization' that I fear is soon to come. I might have to make a full post about this, but I'll chime in the big idea first. So, I define vote monetization as a form of "if you vote for this, you will/can be rewarded". This is currently being done with sports, poker, lotteries, etc. In my mind, this is a slippery slope, where people realize "hey, I could set up one of these, make HUGE profits, and only pay people part of the liquid steem I generate." We had a bot epidemic, a copy-paste epidemic, and I think this is next.
HOWEVER, I don't necessary think the idea in itself is bad. I think the ad-hoc approach is currently the problem. I would be much more interested to see these events and games be implemented as smart contracts on the steem blockchain, with the removal of the high reward going into the 'trusted' account, and the outcome being programically guaranteed rather than based on trust of the user. It would be an interesting setup, to code games people can play on the network.
4. Plans/usage of witness funding:
100% of my power down each week has been sent to @steemcleaners. This also includes my own SP, from my own post rewards and curation rewards. However, as I mentioned above, the changes to the economy are going to effect witness pay. Due to this, I will soon be suspending the action of transferring powerdown to @steemcleaners, and instead re-evaluating the new payment structure (which will be in liquid STEEM) and sending the liquid STEEM over instead. Once the changes come through, and I evaluate, I will be able to announce what this means in terms of funding for the project.
In recent witness events, I wanted to point out this week that witness @abit converted $300,000 SBD, likely at a loss. That was a huge chunk of debt to the steem economy, and I just want to point out how awesome that is -- this is what witnesses should be about, making decisions in the best interest of the group and platform. Thank you @abit!
I wouldn't worry about the aggression towards @cheetah, it's very few but loud people. That said, I'd suggest again to add a little more about @cheetah in the post beyond just a link.
Steemit is structured most like Reddit, and people familiar with social media naturally consider using it like Reddit. The fast payout structure, the short term algorithms etc are not conducive to original content blogging.
The top trending posts on Reddit are literally just links and copy-pastes - most are pictures which don't have a single line of text. Not to mention, Facebook and Twitter. This is a generally acceptable social media norm and is more like "sharing" and not "plagiarism".
Of course, money being involved in Steemit always shakes things up a bit, and it's a completely valid route the Steem community has chosen about rewarding original content while aggressively shunning non-original sharing / plagiarism.
But for the billions of people used to Facebook, Twitter or Reddit, it's pretty baffling to see a blunt @cheetah post. They need some guidance and time to adjust.
I know Steemcleaners does this by warning people about the kind of content the community prefers, but @cheetah reaches out to far more posts.
So, all I'm suggesting is - a simple two or three lines about how Steemit encourages original content and how to get whitelisted and verify if it is indeed their content. It would be a lot more comforting to new authors jumping into Steemit.
Thank you so much for all the good work - keep it up!
Thanks @anyx
@cheetah rules, he don't get enough love :)
Blessings..
Do you think you would then be able to teach @cheetah detecting English posts that are google-like translations from Russian?
Looking for russian content on russian websites, will be very similar to english content on english websites. Unfortunately mixing the languages is a whole other topic. It's a hard problem, as the concept of content matching begins to look more like machine learning (sentence level fuzzy pattern matching, word2vec, etc.), rather than simple pattern matching, as one cannot simply "undo" a translation into the exact content it started as. You can try this yourself by going in google translate, and translating sentences back and forth even in the same language -- the meaning gets garbled.
Even if you could undo a translation, one would have to identify the content language, and then for all languages, search for the content in the translation. Even if we only add one language, this doubles the price of running cheetah (assuming API translation services are free -- they are not).
So, it's a hard problem, and one that I don't really have a way to automate. :(
http://minds.com has an open source translator.
I don't know how efficient it is.
That's probably the way to start, with an offline translation program. However, it unfortunately still increases the search space and cost. :(
I understand. Too bad :(
For the most part, I really appreciate Cheetah and all you do! Thanks
I have also had the concern about vote monetization. @steemsports is basically an emerging prediction market. I participate with it, and I think it's a great idea, but plugging it into a social media platform is sort-of a kludge. In the long run, I hope to see someone develop a steem-based prediction platform where it would be a better fit.
This will be the end of Steemit in my opinion; the "waves" it will cause will be enough to crash the system entirely; when is this happening.
Cg
In my mind the price of steem is unrelated to the abilities the platform. Even if the author reward disappears entirely, the concept of a blockchain backed un-censorable social media platform still remains!
A shake out of 'killer whales (bad actors)', 'investors who want to get out and have no faith in the platform', may be good, as the current system I think ends up doing more long term damage to steem if they are constantly the ones in power while 1) keeping their status of power while continuously selling, and 2) being able to have extreme influence while continuously selling.
I think a shake up is needed!
I appreciate all you do for Steemit. Hopefully you're not running yourself too ragged! Enjoy Steemfest! :)
I heard there was a White List I could get added to with Cheetah.
I have had a visit a couple of times on stories I have added to the Steemit Blockchain Blog .
If my stories have been published on the web elsewhere I will put it in the intro.
It is more to give a mention to the actual website, that took a chance publishing my stuff, than to show it is on the Interwebs somewhere.
I have always thanked Cheetah for spotting the old published articles. And I did not really mind until I realised that some people are avoiding any Steemit Articles/Stories with a Cheetah reply in them. All my stuff is original and written soley by Moi.
Thanks for your time.
I think it's fair if people do not want to vote on content that isn't steemit-exclusive, or is old content, or however they wish to vote. It's their power! :)
If you want to discuss whitelisting, feel free to hop into #steemcleaners-public in steemit.chat.
My impression was that Cheetah's main job was combating plagiarism.
If its priorty is to also control first time only content for Steemit. I stand corrected.
Any Author's job is to expand the readership of any original content he has created.
I do not expect the Steemit community to be aware or have read most of the stuff I have published on the Internet.
And this will also apply to 100% of all Authors on Steemit.
As stated, I am very proud that the websites that took a chance with my writings, also get some publicity when I have published my stories again on Steemit.
The Steemit public are also made aware on any intro they are reading, something that has been published on some far flung corner of the web. That the website in question is worth a look see.
And indeed I agree, our readers are very smart, they will vote with their fingers.
Either be absolutely shocked that an Author would re-publish an exceptional story or be immensely happy they had the chance to read an interesting piece of work they had missed first time around.
Up vote or ignore.
Again I am all for Cheetah hunting down Plagiarism where ever it finds it.
And this I will be happy to maintain, but it should be explained within the Cheetah text that finding the same text on the Interwebs it is not a definitive sign of Plagiarism.
The impression is because cheetah CAN catch plagiarism, that that is her purpose. Indeed, that is the purpose, but there is no way to differentiate ownership, so the voiced intent has to be different. The voiced intent has been changed to represent that there is similar content elsewhere, but does NOT state that this is wrong.
The cheetah message says;
"I found similar content that readers might be interested in"
If we dissect the message, we can note two things:
The message is a notification to readers that there is content in the body that matches another location. The reader must then determine what to do with this information. Is it relevant? Maybe. Is it plagiarism? Maybe. Is it a false positive? Maybe.
As cheetah is a robot, she can never determine with 100% accuracy authorship, ownership, or even accuracy. She is a tool to notify readers that the given post may require addition thoughts before voting. The voter should regard the given information, and according to their own beliefs, determine (depending on the case), for example:
This is a repost: "Do I wish to support old, reposted content?"
This is plagiarism: "Do I wish to support plagiarism?"
This is picking up on something irrelevant to the post: "Should I be smart and ignore the comment?"
Note that I do not tell readers how to vote. Although I personally don't support reposted content, I am aware that other people do. And that's fine! Cheetah just gives readers the ability to make a more informed decision.
Anyways, I'm rambling...
Thanks for the reply. I am a fan of Cheetah. So no problem there.
We agree to dis-agree about reposted content. Without reposted content Shakspeare would never have become so popular. Or The Beatles songs would never get heard again.
Any out of print book/song that is reprinted/replayed in the original Authors name is technically reposted content. If it is still in the original Authors name and it is being reposted to a new generation of fans/public it should be allowed to have it's day in the sun.
Again this is not an argument. It's just a fact of life;D~
It's less about the act of reposting, but more so about the monetized reward of reposting content.
If you can repost your content (or someone else's content) and get paid for it at the same rate as putting effort into new content, should you? Why not do it twice and get twice the reward? Why not do it every day? Why not everyone do it every day? It's a slippery slope in my mind.
Sharing content I believe is fundamentally different to reposting content. We need to be cautious about the reward, not the action. People who "reposted" shakespeares content did not sell it to the same purchasers over and over. And they certainly did not claim to be shakespeare when they sold it to the purchasers, and pocket the reward. They shared the work, usually for free.
I think an author should be free and even encouraged to repost his own content as many times as necesary, exactly for the same reason a book author is free and encouraged to re-publish is book as many times as needed to: a) Increase the monetization of his work, b) Reach new audiences, c) Improve, correct the work (even with very small corrections).
Sure, but if the author is reposting their work without notifying the reader that this is a repost, then the reader assumes the work is new. This is self-plagiarism, fraud, and a big no-no in academia, where my mindset is coming from. If the author up-front says that the work is not novel, then there isn't a cause for concern.
I only used the convert function once, once I became aware that it was the price over the next 7 days, rather than the last 7 days, I never used it again,...
Thanks for the hard work,...
Buahahaha, I'm your 666th follower,....!!
better go to church tomorrow aye
If the girl shows up I will,...
Choir girls are great singers from what i am told ::
Ours has heart,...
Is there a white list function for the "Cheetah" bot, as I post comic books that contain description copy text, so I get pinged for all sorts of other sites when the pictures of the comics I have posted. As much as there are smarter readers who know when something is plagiarized content versus otherwise, there are some people who are worldwide users who may not and it isn't even an intelligence thing, when the bot is named "cheetah" there is a negative implication directly. I have tried replying to other posts, hope you see this and reply, thanks.
Why did you list this posting:
https://steemit.com/deutsch/@spanisch/inspirierende-reden-tiffany-trump-erfolg-teil-2
It took me a lot of time to translate parts of it. It think it is very unfair of you!
@ANYX Followed and upvoted!
I'm new to Steemit visit my post, upvoted and follow me @Sandra16