SteemSTEM Community Feedback: Proposals and Solutions
Change
If there is one thing in life that is a constant, it is that things are ever changing. Crypto as a whole and STEEM specifically are certainly not of exception to the phenomenon of change. Prices fluctuate and active user-ship waxes and wanes along with broad market movements. Dealing with change, is a part of growing an organization or a community. The successful will be those who are flexible, nimble, able to adapt to what ever the world throws at them.
SteemSTEM looks to be that way, and we feel that we have a community that welcomes changes, while still keeping our eyes pointing forward. We have all witnessed the recent decline in the value of STEEM, and we are sure you all also see the declining number of content creators on the Steem blockchain. Good times will surely return again, but in the meantime we must adapt.
Ideas that were effective in the past may not work in the current climate. However the reverse is also true, things that were infeasible before may now become viable paths forward.
Today's weekly update will neither focus on the here and now, nor on recent developments (they are plentiful as for instance the development on steemstem.io continues). We instead look to use this update blog as a call for community input on all project-related issues recently raised on our discord server.
We also present, for the first time, some proposed solutions and directions which we came up with. Whilst nothing of this has been implemented yet, the outcome and reactions to this blog are crucial to help us in setting priorities and finalizing what we should do.
Curation
The first area of concern involves content curation and transparency of how posts are voted upon. In discussions with a small number of community members, it was made known that it is not the reward size that community members are unhappy with. Instead, it is lack of clarity around what defines the strength of a curated posts vote.
While writing such reports takes time and energy, the amount of posts being currently supported is small. As a result curators have more free time, relatively to even 6 months prior. Therefore, we may have a way to correct this, by asking curators to work more... with some fun in return.
Here is our proposal:
- [1] Curators will get a new task: write a curation report for any post upvoted more than 50%, explaining why this post is a good post and the reasons behind the strong upvote.
- [2] An algorithm will be designed by our one-man development team to track automatically those reports and assign them a score (on the basis of the level of details given in the report).
- [3] The reports and scores will then be reviewed manually for a confirmation, manual curation being always yielding greater accuracy, by someone to whom this role will be assigned.
- [4] The reports will be upvoted, as they are valuable for the SteemSTEM community, once the score will be confirmed.
- [5] The best curator of the week will get a nice badge on his/her steemstem.io profile as well as an upvote-bonus for his/her own posts. Additionally, all-time tracking of these awards will also be maintained and made available on steemstem.io
Moreover, due to the low volume of posts, we remove the rule enforcing a single author to get less than 3% of all SteemSTEM upvotes of the last two weeks (let’s simply reward the people still with us during these dark times).
Engagement and Honor Members
We would also like to discuss engagement, or more specifically the lack of it. But before, let us focus on the SteemSTEM Honor Members a little bit. Honor Members are a class of trusted, motivated, high quality content creators who are symbolic of the very best of SteemSTEM.
Out of that group mentors were chosen, whom users (new and old) could ask for help on the construction of content that better fit within the SteemSTEM guidelines. Our Honor Members and Mentors selflessly help others to create better content, and do this not for the rewards but because they see the potential of what we are trying to accomplish. They see where this community can go!
In addition, a second subset of Honor Members were dedicated to track engagement and a third subset of them were focusing on dealing with the 'questions-and-complaints' room of our discord server.
However, the number of active users is in decline Steem wide, and with that the number of new content creators as well. So... a big part of the way that these respected community members were able to be involved, is just not currently available.
Rather than sitting around and waiting for what once was to return, we propose a new direction and offer Honor Members new options to work with. In short: let us reward the good users instead of punishing the ones lacking of engagement.
- [1] The Honour Members will be assigned the task of tracking and scoring the exemplary comments that are worthy to be rewarded. The information will be passed to our curation team for a SteemSTEM upvote.
- [2] Our one-man development team will design a script tracking all rewarded comments and get some rankings. The top commenters will get an upvote-bonus for some their posts and comments, as well as a nice badge on their steemstem.io profile. There will be 'levels' to these badges and continued efforts will allow a user to improve their badge rank (and get more rewards). An all-time tracking will also be put in place.
- [3] The Honour Members sub-categories will cease to exist. Every Honour Member will be asked to help how he/she can with the various missions.
- [4] Both Honour Members and curators could optionally write reports to posts upvoted below 50%, explaining what could be improved. Those reports will be reviewed and upvoted. This will count for the “best curator” reward contest above-mentioned.
This is where we stand for now. Feel free to let us know your thoughts. Are there things you would like to see added? How can we help you have more fun? Thank you for your feedback and shared opinions!
The SteemSTEM management and public relation teams!
Make sure to follow steemstem on steemstem.io, steemit, facebook, twitter, and instagram to always be up-to-date on our latest news and ideas. Please also consider to support the project by delegating to @steemstem for a ROI of 65% of our curation rewards (quick delegation links: 50SP | 100SP | 500SP | 1000SP | 5000SP | 10000SP).
Hope this would not discourage curators from giving out big votes? Some of them might be busy with their schedules, and may have just few minutes to curate. And making them to write reports for giving out large votes could make them resort to curating posts with smaller votes - so maybe they wouldn't pass through the stress of writing reports. My thoughts though; I could be wrong.
I believe this would increase post engagement within the community. And people would drop constructive comments.
Nice one. Better days ahead. Change is always constant
There was a demand for that originating from the community. For now, there is not much work (because not much posts) which is why we proposed it.
This crossed my mind too. Generally this is avoided because work is reflected with a commission fee which we don't have, so hopefully we can incentivize enough with other benefits and trust the curators to believe in what we do (which is the only thing keeping pretty much anyone on board)
Honestly, I don't think having curators to write also reports to justify their votes is a good idea. Most of people here on steemit have a work and their schedule, curators primary task should be to read posts and suggest a vote. If I remember correctly, to get voted posts need the approvation by 2 curators: this is the transparency control. The best would be to have at least 2 curators per language (or even 3!), to speed up the evaluation process and avoid post getting translate to english, with more work for english curators. Having more curators not only will make evaluating process more transparent and fair, but will also speed up things up.
As for number of posts: there is really little we can do about it. Steem is way down in value and top authors prefer to not invest so much time in writing good and deep content if they are getting a really little reward in STU. This is why all authors posting right now, for me, should have a "bonus" and getting higher votes when they hit a certain quality level (for example all 65 posts getting a 100 vote, if VP is ok).
Also, as you already suggested, It would be nice to have more comment engaging. This could be done also by voting comments with the steemstem account, maybe with a 20% power, in order to get a nice reward. But this require a lot of effort, more than the honor members, by the authors themselves. In fact, it would be really hard for a guy to track all comments on STEM posts (I think people will just read posts they are interested in) while it's way more easy (and fair) let the authors report (maybe in a specified channel) the posts where valuable comments are written.
Last but not least: I think It would be really useful to have something like a technical comment under low rewarded posts. Some people just think that re-writing things found on wikipedia or other common sources is doing "STEM posts" and this generate lot of misunderstandings and complains. What if on posts voted for less than 65% , steemstem bot use a different post comment, sayng "your reward was low, if you want to know how to improve contact us on the discord"? This way we can make the "question and complain" channel more a "question" one and less "complain/beg" channel.
Anyway, thanks for the hard work on this project, I really admire all of you guys! Let's hope the market will get up soon!
Thanks for your comment!
Actually, this demands comes from the community directly. People want to know why they got such an upvote. While I agree this represents a lot of work in general, this is not the case today (we don't vote much). This is why we put it on the table. In addition, reports will be upvoted.
I already know how to do so (the tracking) automatically. Also note that the HM team is large :)
I will think about it. This is a nice suggestion.
I also really like your last paragraph about the different wording for the 20/20 posts. I think that is an easy fix and could go a long way.
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Oh, I like the idea of finding and rating good comments.
We will skip our usual generic part of the comment and go straight to the point. We want to congratulate you on your decision to open discussion to the Crowd and we hope it will spawn constructive and productive brainstorming with many participants.
Steemstem as one of the most important projects on this platform should be an example of good practice. And it is. This is the way to push the things even further. We will follow the discussion and probably participate from our personal accounts. Of course, we will support good participants with our upvote - it is not much, but we hope it will help to develop a good atmosphere.
Best regards
Thanks for passing by and for your support!
Personally I don't like this thing that everyone wants to force on steemit - we are all equal - let's be honest - we are not. And as far as I am concerned there shouldn't be any reports for the sake of reports - and showing what people have done right, they probably know it and other people probably won't even read it.
More about curation - I think it is good as it is (about transparency) we see "who voted" and what percent - that is just fine and lets be honest curators must be objective but with more transparency and reports there will be more subjectivity to it and making it a lot harder for them. What curators could do is actually start a discussion in comment section - which will add more value to comments and be an example to others (doesn't have to be a must; but rather if they find it good post or want to know a bit more about something in it).
Now speaking of comments - it is a great idea! Practice shows that with more comments and engagement more material is produced - especially if it is encouraged by other users - and making a post about something discussed in the comment section is just amazing. Comment voting is a must - doesn't need to be a greart percent - but maybe 10-20/0 is just enough or something similar.
P.S. I must start using steemstem.io - it is so easy to find posts with it and it is great for reading but somehow when I post I do it on steemit : / must change that activity.
Lets keep rocking this chain! :)
The point is not to write reports for writing reports, but mainly to answer a demand from the community. People are confused about the choice of the voting strengths and we want to fill this gap. As this requires more work from the curators, we propose to incentive them with a report-upvote. On the other hand, having reports being an open door to discussions is a good idea.
I still need to improve this but time is limited... ;)
just to clarify this. We propose the vote, for example, 20/20 or 65/65. Another curator than confirms the value and vote. So if you have seen that I've "executed" the vote it doesn't mean that I've made the decision by my own will
This is a good idea, and I often do this if... I know what's going on in that particular post. For "space stuff" I'm completely blunt :(
I agree with you, some content sucks. Doesn't matter if you worked hard on it, if it's bad it's bad. I could spend days painting something, and I guarantee you it would suck. :)
I really like the general direction this ship is heading in. As is discussed in the post everything should be focused around user engagement. Unlike the other commenters I dont have really much to say, as I think only time will tell how the changes would effect the community.
The only thing I am not totally sure is the report by curators thing. Do you propose this report would be posted in a separate post or in the comments of the said post. I think, personally, that it should be posted in the comments section and be as brief and concise as possible. And I also think it should be done for the posts upvoted 20/20 as they are truly the ones who could use the help. I know this is more work but it can be as much as three bullet points per post.
Maybe an interesting proposal would be to go more in depth about the posts that are highlighted every week in the "digest" and why they are good.
This combined with "reports" in the comment section would bring general guidelines to the community and also specific guidelines to content creators themselves.
Just some ideas... But in general I like the direction we are heading in. Very good job.
I agree with what you said. The reports were to be put in comments (too hard to track and messy otherwise). For the 20/20, this may mean too much work for a small team of curators. We have several ways to go over that, the two natural ones being involving HM (as proposed here) our increasing the size of the team (considered but not proposed for now). Anyways, we will move forward and we may need to retune at some point. But we will try to do something.
Agree. Tagging @ruth-girl on this one as the distilled is her baby.
I don't think more work should be placed on Ruth's shoulders. Perhaps other curators can get more involved in the distilled, as things used to be in the past?
Instead of just being a smart-ass I am more than willing to do my part in this. I am willing to do this job of describing the distilled posts if you decide on this.
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Thanks for the kind offer!
I appreciate the effort and I think that keeping an open mind will help the community grow in the long run. The idea of gamification is a nice one and I think that once we start more ideas will come up. About the idea of the reports from the curators, it can be done but I am not sure it will help addressing the complaints. I think the issue is that we are being fair but some users want equal votes instead. Treating everyone fairly is different than treating everyone equally. If we flatten the rewards too much to make everyone equal we risk of over-rewarding mediocre posts and discouraging people that actually spent hours doing research and writing good and engaging content. About the engagement, I think we need to create the right user-base. Communities are made by users that share the same values, we need more users that actually are involved in science so professors, scientists, post-docs, students..so we should focus on doing things that would provide value to them and in doing so we also disseminate fact-based knowledge.
Thanks for the feedback. I am all in line with you for what concerns curation: Fairness = yes; equality = no. I do not know whether the reports will help (I guess there is only one way to know: trying it), and probably the complaint will become different. But at least they will address the current (justified) complaints.
In stem-espanol as of last week, we proposed a reward to those people who provided positive comments in different posts, this I did to increase participation and encourage users. I decided to distribute 2 steem to the 3 users with the greatest participation and, of course, their comments are productive, interesting (without stupid comments). It's just a test and I was in charge of monitoring everything manually and I could see that the comments in the publications increased.
With regard to the writing of a report for those publications that deserve more than 50% of the votes, for me it is not bad, I will do it with pleasure.
And the idea of mentors following up on exemplary and valuable comments, this is great. I hope all this works and increases participation.
Please let me know for what concerns the outcome of the test. I am very curious! I am glad to read that stem-espanol share the ideas in this proposal!
Sincerely, I could see that the comments in the publication increased, this is due to the economic incentive (it is not the idea, but it helps the growth of the community), not all the comments are good, but if there are people dedicated to perform excellent questions that they engage in good debates
Let's see how we are doing in this new week. @lemouth
I would recommend for us to create maybe a space for people who were considered newbies (never received any form of upvotes) or people who have been blacklisted by steemstem before. Maybe we can create a channel which acts as a classroom for newbies to simply ask questions regarding their post, requesting help from existing mentors (or honour members) or simply would like to request opinions regarding the topics of their article. I know people would like to have a private one-on-one session with their mentor but sometimes, mentors are not around, so it will lead to a constant harassment of other management's inboxes. If a newbie or previously blacklisted people would be able to prove themselves by producing 3 or more worth upvoted article, then they will simply graduate.
It will be easier for people who are new and do not know who to contact or how to start. After they graduated, they will simply leave (or kicked) out of the channel and the channel can only be accessed by management and people who were added. I'm sure, mentors and other honour members would be more productive this way since they were not assigned to a specific person. It's like we were trying to filter as much as possible people who were trying to plagiarise (intended and unintended alike) and the classroom act like a short informal course of writing before they can be a trusted STEM writer. But then again, our system now is pretty solid so...
I am not sure why such a space would be needed, as what you describe is exactly the role of the HM. Maybe improving the communication with the mentors could be useful or even introducing a back-up mentor. But I am not convinced on the necessity of a dedicated space. Note that mentors are, in my impression, always available so that I am not sure to see a need for this. But maybe could you share some counterexample?
Concerning the levelling thing, we have something in mind along these lines, but this is not for today ;)