Did you give your steemit voting keys away?
Curating takes up a lot of time and attention. When the option to make curation rewards without putting in much effort is there, we can become irresponsible curators. Curating is a big responsibility. Rewarding as many users as possible without making people after months of creating content feel left out can be tough, and it's an importort part of user retention.
About three weeks ago I decided I was spending too much time on steemit. But I also didn't want my feed to go without my votes. I signed up to a service call steemvoter.com. At the cost of just one vote per day, I could vote for up to 100 authors without ever logging in. But of course my addiction to steemit wouldn't let me stay away. When I logged in I noticed one of the posts I voted for made it to the trending page which is always nice to see! Especially because I try not to target the regulars!
Unfortunately it wasn't a post in my list. It was the post I agreed to upvote in order to use the service, the @steemvoter post. Since the content was being valued at $80+ I decided to read it and it was indeed an interesting read.
https://steemit.com/steemvoter/@steemvoter/steemvoter-com-curation-guild-proposal-dec-15th-2016
This post outlined an interesting idea to use the votes of the users of the service as a voting guild. I thought if the guild would be used to bring new users or undervalued users to the trending page then that would be brilliant. However, my concern was that many people who use the service were going to be opted in automatically, and they may not realise if they have voted for something they otherwise wouldn't want to.
These concerns were promptly answered in another post here.
https://steemit.com/steemvoter/@steemvoter/steemvoter-com-guild-proposal-continued-dec-16th-2016
But I personally wasn't really satisfied with the defense of the Opt-out only option.
I was very pleased when they began an author spotlight series in which I could see which posts they would probably be supporting with their guild.
Then one day...
Without receiving any notification I noticed that steemvoter had 2 posts on the trending page. Each post made $90+. I felt very uneasy about this as there was no communication regarding a change of agreement so I decided to email @marcgodard and find out if there had been some kind of mistake.
It seemed like very bad customer service to change terms without notifications so I chose to change my keys and immediately decided to never give my keys to a third party again.
Is this service free?
When I signed up it didn't seem like I was paying anything to use the service, since all I need to give is one vote. However nothing in life comes for free. With the accumulation of all of those upvotes by customers who agreed to those terms, this service takes (currently) around $90 per day from the reward pool. This is not at a cost to the voter, who received a curation reward, this is at a cost to every pending payout post.
Those who do not use this service do not benefit from this service and so some users used their vote to decrease the price paid to a service they don't use. This may have caused the retaliation you see below.
https://steemit.com/spam/@marcgodard/steemvoter-com-stats-dec-4th-2016
We are the beta testers of this social media site and it is up to us as the "guardians of the blockchain" to reassess potential issues and try to find solutions before we can really go mainstream.
If you have signed up to this service, you should know that your voting keys were used today, not on a post, but on a comment on a 3 month old post. In fact, even if you haven't signed up to steemvoter you may have unknowingly voted for this comment rewarding it with $90 from the reward pool. Some users have found that their own curation trail has opted into auto upvoting this content.
Though the system may be designed to allow this to happen, the community doesn't have to be.
Curate responsibly, beware of autovoting.
Native speakers only.
Google translate not permitted.
you seem very dedicated to the community , like that
you mean I can translated in my first language which is Persian with of course mentioning you as the source?
Absolutely, please do :)
already on it :)
Hi beanz, good open discussion on the topic. I think that autovoting can be done better with rules and interfaces that keep the user engages and in control of the votes. I have been building an app for steemit that does just this, and hope to get a couple of my beta testers on it and released within days. It also requires your "vote" as a service fee, but it offers much more to the user, a new user interface, new views and easiler ways to filter and manage what posts you care about and IF you want to auto vote them up. It is also a web app only, NO SERVICE so it only runs when you want it to run in your browser. I think its a different offering but very interested in how to "earn" something from it with people's votes as well, since it has been hundreds of hours to develop it for the community. I think that deserves some level of payment, doesn't it, so doesn't steemvoter as well?
With so many services and games coming up that require your vote to use, I'm beginning to see this as unsustainable. Those who don't use a service and see the post as over-valued will simply down-vote the post. I think people should start charging users for using services and playing games so that the reward pool can be used to benefit the entire community, not just those who participate in a game or service.
I love the sound of the app you're developing though and would be happy to pay for it rather than drain the reward pool (of money that just doesn't belong to me)
Yes. You deserve payment to run your business. Curie deserves payment to run their business. Steemsports deserves payment to run their business.
But the payment shouldnt come out of the reward pool, because eventually, when there is nothing to vote on except you guys fuding your businesses, no one is going to have any use for your business.
ya, I think the steem opportunity where people pay with votes is certainly an easy entry point for a business, but I do like your point, that it can be paid for from outside money, which would then feed more into the steem eco systems really. I'll likely look at a payment option to pay for my app as an alternative and promote, or some other way to "invest in steem" to use my app, as I truly want it to help grow the community, not damage the rewards system in any way.
If other auto-voting services are inadvertently getting sucked into this, that would explain why my vote got involved because I'm on Streemian. Therefore, I've just removed myself from the curation trail I was following there for the time being until any and all question marks here are addressed.
per your request.... https://steemit.com/voting/@sigmajin/the-dwin-fallacy-in-defense-of-the-flag-part-ii
Also, i think this is troubling about steemvoter
Now seems to happen what I was always afraid of:
Too much power in too few hands. Not only the steempower in only a few hands, which seems to be taken care of, but also the votes of the remaining smaller users bundled into wannabe oligarchs.
That is why I never gave away my voting key so far and probably wouldn´t in the future. If I understood the system right, I only hurt myself if I don´t vote, the amount spread to the community stays the same every block.
The idea behind the trails and curie and the other systems is good and probably also needed as long as our little society reflects real life society (95% of assets belonging to 1% of people). For the future I hope for more decentralized, personalized and manual voting.
Great questions asked, following the discussion!
Supported
@beanz
@the.masses downvoted our posts, let wipe it out.
Anybody can use that account. You can just log in and remove the down votes lol.
I will wipe it out
Changed my keys, just read a whole lot about this and didn't like what I read
People should always be conscious of what is being done with their voting keys. If they don't like it they can simply change them.
I think curation vote bots without human eyeballs seeing the post are a cancer in the community. The point should be to create valuable content, not to get rich quick on the latest crypto fad.
I agree. Curators should be more focussed on the long-term benefits of responsible curation to bring new users and retain users on the platform. Any author-auto-voting demotivates users. But we are the beta-testers, and we are learning along the way how the system can be gamed so that we can come up with solutions either through system changes or community effort.