Real Promotional Value
I recently have been making a hobby out of playing with the Steemit UI, aka the condenser, and picking up changes that are requested in the issue tracker. The ones that are tagged with a "help wanted" are the ones that are more likely to be accepted and merged.
But I have seen issues raised in the past that I would also have loved to see. One of these concerns promoted posts.
Mentioned in the past here and here and I'm sure in many other comments, this proposal of showing promoted posts in higher visibility areas resonated with me. And that's because I have been talking about exactly this kind of change.
It was also suggested and closed in the issue tracker here pending infrastructure changes. I assume that these changes would possibly be affected by what's happening with AppBase, but still, I couldn't help just trying it out.
You might be wondering why I am bothering with Steemit instead of a separate project altogether. Well the reason is simple:
Steemit is the dominant UI of the current possibilities, and so such changes will have the largest impact. It also happens to be my favorite interface to use thus far.
Changes Made
As you can see in the screenshot, it implements one of the suggestions of the @ura-soul post. Posts that would have been in the promoted tab have now snuck into trending and hot, and marked as promoted.
The change is actually fairly small, involving
- Fetching of the state of the promoted page in addition to that of trending and hot.
- Interleaving the promoted posts with the others.
- Style changes to mark promoted posts.
So far I took a bit of a shortcut in marking all posts that have been promoted with nonzero value rather than just the ones that were selected and interleaved, but at the moment you are not likely to notice much since barely anyone uses promoted.
If you want to see how it would look in action, you can temporarily visit where I am currently staging the change (it may not always be up as I play with it more):
https://cryptoempirebot.com/trending/
(Yeah the domain was for when I used to help run a bid bot with that name)
It also works with different tags, like
https://cryptoempirebot.com/trending/food
Don't trust the page with your login, obviously. Not that I personally could do anything with it because I did not make malicious changes.
Anyway, what do you all think? Personally I think this change would yield some very interesting changes in promotional behavior, and to the benefit of the platform as a whole. The reason I want to share it is because I will soon be submitting the pull request, and wondering what its reception would be like in general. Also I'm a little bit too excited about this. But... What are the chances this will make it, I wonder...
Interesting. I had been thinking of a few ways to kludge together a custom feed to make my curating life easier, but for some reason didn't think about hacking on condenser itself.
Could you comment on how involved it is to set up a locally hosted copy? In particular, how much dependency hell is there in the build process and do you have to sync up with the blockchain and stuff, or can it use an api to access it?
It's surprisingly easy. Especially if you already have docker installed, it really is a copy paste from their GitHub docs. (The non docker flow also probably is copy paste with a few more steps but I never used that)
You don't run anything that syncs up the blockchain, you connect to a node that's already set up.
Sounds super easy, I've been fighting the urge all week to play around with it, probably going to give in on the next day or so.
Maybe you are interested in custom feed. A tool I developed using the API of steem.
@jga , I'm a big fan of your custom feed ever since @trufflepig suggested it. I have used it to good success for finding content in the past and it's certainly a valuable curator's tool. The main itches I'm looking to scratch (other than just playing around with coding) are hotkeys, preloading articles, shuffling things off 'to be read later', and not showing repeats (especially stuff that I've acted on but is now resteemed).
I am interested in what you are doing but I don't know a thing about it. I never even go look at the trending or promoted areas since about a month after i got on here.
I did notice that the promoted posts I saw on the pages had the green rectangular box outline around them, is that what you have added to this or has that always been the case?
That's what I added yes. Yeah I know a lot of us don't look at trending but apparently so many others are doing so, and I hope to make an improvement that will benefit a lot more people. Both promoters and the platform. That includes investors, but in a more roundabout way.
Well I finally got one right. I think that it would serve a good purpose, it makes it where you are aware that there is a difference from the others on the page and then notice the words "promoted". I couldn't see any reason why someone would have a problem with that addition.
So this is your little project Eon hahahha. It is a small change but is useful to see.
I'm sure everyone has a million different ideas on just how to fix Trending (me, I've been hoping for a consensus-layer change rather than just in the default frontend), but... let's do something. STEEM is down, crypto in general is down, the world's eyes are away for now... let's use this time to break some things and fix them better.
I think we should at least try it. I know that I would probably spend some money on promotion for things like project announcements, etc., if I knew it wasn't helping to centralise stake. Having it marked as promoted helps at least a little bit to reclaim the social meaning of "trending," as well.
Personally, I'd merge this thing yesterday. Good luck.
Yeah, consensus-layer is certainly an interesting idea, but I think the thread in the github makes good points about not forcing this on all front ends that may choose different strategies for how to treat promoted data.
But yes, I sent it in, hoping for the best :)
Awesome work! I think this is a no-brainer change and hopefully it will be accepted.
If you're interested, I've been working on making the feed a more personalized experience. I'd love to hear your thoughts. https://steemit.com/@littlejoeward/my-personalized-steem-feed-proof-of-concept-is-ready-for-testers
Ah yes content discovery. That is definitely sorely needed and an interesting project. Will check it out. I'd be willing to test it out as well.
Well I don't think mixing it up all in trending will be a well-thought move either. Trending itself is already bloated with self promotion contents.
Well here's my rationale, and it is pretty much covered in the links I referenced.
Bid bots already abuse trending with their promotion system using stake. I'm aiming to introduce competition from a promotion system that will help the platform. That money goes back to the pool, the money used for promotion. Which isn't the case when stake is being bought to promote.
Now the long term vision isn't likely to be satisfied but imagine that the payout value of the post was actually the payout assigned to the post instead of a mixture of organic votes and bot votes. So promoted posts show up as promoted and trending is organic.
How can you argue that this is not an improvement? Or at least approaching an improvement?
Promotion, like it or not, is actually a component that gives value to any social media platform. Let's actually make it work in a better way.
I agree with everything you're saying, but I believe this is actually technically wrong. If I understand correctly, when a post is promoted, it simply means that the permalink has been included in a memo in a transfer of SBD to @null, which is an irreversible burn, not a "return to the pool."
This, of course, is equivalent to dividing that money among all current STEEM holders, since by burning SBD it decreases the debt owed to SBD holders as a whole and thus, the "virtual supply" of STEEM.
Feel free to correct me if you know more about this than I do, but that's my current understanding.
You are absolutely right, I just didn't want to get into it ;).
(edit)- and now that I thought about it again, thanks for clarifying this, i shouldn't claim this does more than it really does. "going back to pool" makes it sound much better than reality.
Hey, in my opinion, burning is great. Any time you burn SBD, it decreases our collective debt, rewarding all STEEM and VESTS holders. Any time you burn STEEM, it decreases total supply, again rewarding all STEEM and VESTS holders.
Feel the Burn!
I think it's an interesting change. As someone who doesn't spend money on bidbots or promotion, I still think this would benefit me (if less people abused bid bots, and it was shown they are promoted rather than appear as organic rewards). It would put us in a leveled playing field I suppose. We'll see what happens :3
Agreed!
Fuck yeah!
This was a change that I myself supported.
I also suggested that they could perhaps put them in traditional advertising positions, such as on the top or side.
Yeah I saw that too. That one will be not as clear to me how to do easily. It seems you'd possibly want some sort of more sophisticated targeting for that. I wonder if someone is thinking about building that, but it likely needs coordination with major front ends to agree that it's what they want.
That would be useful. I stopped going to the trending and hot page early on, there was rarely anything there that interested me.
I wish I understood this.