Thoughts for Curation Guilds
I was interested to see that one of the features I am most looking forward to (curation guilds) is actually an unpopular feature for a lot of people. I also noticed that during last night's Steem Speak, Ned mentioned an implementation detail that has me a little concerned. I wanted to throw a few thoughts out there and try and start a discussion.
Why Curation Guilds Are Needed
- Currently the main choices for whales to vote are: curate manually, use a voting bot, abstain from voting altogether, or give their private posting key to someone / some group (like Curie) / or a third-party website (like Streemian) to vote on their behalf.
- Many whales are not good manual curators.
- Many investors are not going to want to curate, but they will lose money if they don't.
- Without advanced AI, bots are generally doing a bad job curating. It will also be expensive/costly to design bots to properly curate based on an advanced defined set of parameters.
- Using bots to vote are also difficult for a "plain investor" to setup.
- Many users are not going to want to share their private posting key with other users or third party websites for security reasons.
- Dedicated manual curators are arguably the best people to be reviewing content and deciding which content deserves the most upvotes.
What Curation Guilds Should Do
- Allow users to delegate their voting power to groups of curators (guilds) who will do a better job curating than they will.
- Allow groups of curators to form, that review posts and comments and hunt down good content that meet their criteria.
- Provide another way for Steemians to group together and form communities.
- Distribute the voting pool across a larger variety of content.
- Add transparency to a lot of the voting that takes place.
- Allow users to define what the stand for as far as what should be voted on.
Recommended Features
- The ability to chose a name and avatar for the guild
- The ability to define the rules for the guild
- The ability to join and leave a guild
- The ability to decide how much of your voting power to delegate to a guild
- The ability to delegate your voting power to multiple guilds
- The ability to designate positions (admin, voting power delegate, voter)
- Some type of ranking system within the guild
- The ability to audit the voting behavior of the guild, and the individual members voting on its behalf
- Different ways to compare and rank guilds
- The ability to define how much of the curation reward the guild will receive vs. how much the owner will receive
- Users in a guild should still be able to cast their own votes when they want to
Unanswered Questions
- How will a curation guild actually cast votes?
Will there be designated users who are able to cast the votes?
How will the interface distinguish between those users doing just 'regular' voting, and voting on behalf of the guild? - How will the block-chain decide the order of who voted from a curation perspective, when all the votes from the guild are cast at the same time?
- How will the curation rewards be delegated across the members of a guild?
Please share your thoughts/comments!
What about... 'The guild of extremely silly memes' or 'The esteemed guild of weed photographers'?
nice :)
I honestly don't know how I feel about curation guilds, @timcliff.
I have been an organic curator since I've started. I'm constantly hunting for new content and new people. I also have my favorites, but I always read what I upvote and I would say that I comment on about 90+% of what I read.
It's one thing to get 100+ votes, but I personally appreciate comments so much more. At least there is interaction.
Let me put it to you this way (and I may have mentioned something similar in my posts) - I'm not a hooker looking for quickies and tossed change. I want to build relationships. Anyone who delegates their voting power to a curator should stipulate community growth and nurturing. In other words, leave a fucking comment and show that you care.
I have certain expectations from content creators: use headers, tags, pictures, white space, and content thoughtfully. Cite your work. Make your posts presentable. Show people that you care about your content and don't just slap shit up there for the sake of posting. We keep saying we want quality posts How about QUALITY CURATION TOO? Upvotes are easy. Leaving a thoughtful comment actually takes heart and consideration. This should be a two-way street. Rant over
If you started a curation guild with those principles, I would probably join :)
Valid points from where I sit... Especially in the building of relationships. I appreciated the rant @merej99.
Thanks for your work Tim.
IMO, it's a mixed bag.
Some groups automatically upvote one another. Other guilds make an effort to really curate well and effectively.
Anyone paying attention to Curie knows that the articles get read, at least twice, plus they have to meet minimum criteria. They're submitted by someone who has ostensibly made sure it meets the criteria and read it for content. Then it's verified and finally it's voted on.
I like using SteemVoter, but Marc noted recently that some folks haven't really been using it well. Streemian is a nice service too, as long as it's used responsibly. I wouldn't have a clue how that's going, but it's a nice service for curation groups or even if someone's working on a project where it can help.
I didn't get what exactly Ned said that was so concerning.
Those are all really good points! You are right. If the curation guilds that formed were all of the caliber of Curie, I think they would be a huge success. They could be just as bad than bots though (if not worse) if users just started banding together to upvote each other's content regardless of quality.
It's not a huge deal, but I'm glad you asked. I kind of glossed over that and just buried my suggestion in the recommendation section. The part I thought was a bad idea was to only allow users to be in one guild at a time. I think it would be better for the ecosystem if users could split their voting power across multiple guilds.
You've got a lot of great thought put into this.
I think that every once in a while (at least) most users need the encouragement that a nice payout brings.
With the low price of steem and not so many whales, curation groups are doing a great job of helping the community in this area.
Excellent post @timcliff.
Thanks @papa-pepper! :)
Thank you for putting this one out there.
So called 'curation guilds' are mis-named. Do the 'curators' actually read the posts, think about them, and evaluate the value?
I'd be surprised if they did.
I suspect that the name should be 'processing'...they process the steem-stream. Something akin to desalination.
I do. I've been doing it very carefully over the past 5 weeks as a kr tag community curator.
Are you talking about the situation today, or what they are proposing to add? Nobody really knows how they are going to work, but it would be up to each guild to decide on what/how to vote. In theory, guilds that were not doing a good job would lose their backing from the SP holders who were delegating their voting power.
today..."curation" 'bots' for example.
The whole point of 'curation' is an inhouse replication of a free market economy. That is...you read a post (analogous to a newpaper or a paperback book)...you like it...you buy it..
Only we got the order wrong. We get paid (bribed?) to upvote something. I suspect the majority of which never gets looked at by human eyes. There's a disconnect. To work well it should be reconnected. I dunno how.
I agree that today it's bad. I think most people do too. The proposal of curation guilds is intended to address that very issue. I'm really hoping that it will work!
It would seem to me that 'curation guilds' and ' voting bots' are gaming the system.
at the moment I have 1,718,735 units from posting. During the same time it took to get that I have 4,473 units from Curation.Three orders of magnitude lower I think? Millions vs thousands. Perhaps I should be less concerned with what pays less and more concerned with what pays more?
Would you rather have the whales using voting bots or curation guilds?
Do I have a choice?
Replying here due to nesting.
If it were up to you, which would you prefer the whales to use? Voting bots or voting guilds?
Suppose I chose neither?
The IDEA is to read something, like/dislike vote/not vote/ flag.
.The very concept of guilds presupposes processing.
In fact I wouldn't argue to hard against eliminating curating rewards altogether.
but it's irrelevant. The whales built this place. They offered to let me come in and play.
I'm doing that.
If I invited someone to come play in my sandbox and they started complaining about the toys I might just kicke them out.
So I'll just wait and see.
Because money is involved, the system needs to be setup in such a way that it can determine which content is "good". If there was no curation reward, there would not be very much incentive for people to spend the time finding good undiscovered content. They would just upvote for their friends stuff, and random things they came across that they liked.
You should read the comment from @luzcypher in this post. The post itself has nothing to do with curation, but the comment does a really good job explaining its importance.
Hehe, yeah. I totally agree. I have that exact same thought when people go on rants about how much this place "sucks". I'm not against constructive criticism and feedback (even this post has one thing I disagree with Ned on), but this place wouldn't exist at all if it weren't for Dan/Ned and the people who designed/built it and helped bring the system/community to life. We are interacting in a world that they created for us, and we should be thankful it is as awesome as it is :)
I predicted about 3 months ago that we'll see some curation guilds here really soon ) However I still hope that curation guilds are just an intermediate before proper rShares market will be implemented.
I'm not familiar with the concept. Can you please explain what that is?
More formal description is here
https://steemit.com/witness-category/@arhag/witness-arhag-update-aug-9-2016-to-aug-18-2016
and as for more informal you can check out my latest post )
I'll check it out, thanks!
If you reduce lock time period significantly ( say a months or two instead of 2 year)and reduce steem inflation down to 10% then the distribution of power will be much much faster, whales will be able to sell their whole stake in a couple month and there would be buyers on the other side to buy it because the inflation would be reduced.
If this is done curation guild will quickly become obsolete.
I agree it could have an impact on curation guilds if the did this. People who invest and are holding SP though are still going to want to earn curation rewards while they are holding it though. If they don't want to manually curate or use the other options above (voting bots, etc.) then there will still be a place for curation guilds.
One of the ideas that has been tossed around is having some sort of investor-VESTS that would not have content voting rights (nor earn curation rewards) but would instead benefit from some higher interest rate (equivalent to lower inflation). This would mean that only actual social media users and not investment-motivated holders would be curating and earning curation rewards.
I think this is probably a better solution than curation guilds because even choosing and monitoring a guild that is doing a good job on curation is something that many investors are probably not interested in doing and won't do very well. There are some very tricky issues with making this work though.
Good point. I would support the idea of investor-vests. I think it would potentially solve a large part of the problem. I still really like the idea of guilds though, largely because of the social aspect. I think the idea of people banding together under a shared set of principles to help each other curate could add a lot of value (if it were implemented the right way). IMO, a combination of both curation guilds and investor-vests would be the most ideal.
I support the social aspect of guilds as well, and I agree with the points you made in your post about guilds forming communities, having rankings, ways to communicate, etc. I don't think guilds are a great solution to the problem of investors not wanting to actively curate though, nor do I think it is generally a good idea for stake to be "rented out" (even more than is already happening). Stakeholders banding together to cooperate, exercise quality control over each other, and function as a community I do support.
Actually that's a good point. I didn't thought about that. Curation guilds would still be useful. People that have time to curate could outsource power from other and make money from it. So yeah it would still be a good use case regardless.
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we could also make cross-clan competitions and statistics and reasons to keep clans smaller, keeping the competition alive keeps steemit alive.
Yeah, that would be awesome :)
Good one, @timcliff. Upvoted and resteemed.
Thanks :)