Designing a Curation Guild System for Steemit
I have been waiting patiently for news about the proposed Delegated Curation Guild feature to show up on Steemit Blog. I can understand, of course, that it's not the highest priority and is probably months away. Meanwhile, I wish to share my thoughts on the features required to make a complete and effective curation guild system.
Everything in this post comes from my experience as a full time curator for the last four months with Curie. Fair warning, this will be an in-depth, geeky post with a complete feature specification which will only interest heavily involved curators and developers. Also, I sincerely apologize for the lack of images and illustrations - I'm a rather poor artist. If any of the talented folks here would like to draw up mock ups and such - please feel free to do so, you may repost all content here.
Today's curation guilds - mostly a series of hacks
Currently, there are several different functions that go into running a full scale curation guild like Curie. They are -
- Convincing voting power donors (technically R-shares donor, but for the purpose of this post, we'll just call them voting power donor) that your curation is worthy of being followed.
- Co-ordinating and managing various curators and voters across different time zones.
- Setting guidelines for curators to follow.
- Finding posts that meet these guidelines and a certain quality standard.
- Checking posts for plagiarism, abuse.
- Verifying an author's history.
- Vouching and verification of each post by second person, different from the finder - the Voter.
- Determining a voting strength, and pulling the trigger. The last two functions are performed by the voter.
- Running a network of bots which manages voting across many different voting power donors with varying criteria.
- Maintaining voting power as requested by donors.
- Staying under budget and operational capacity.
- Accounting and payments.
- Preparing and publishing reports, for transparency and generating revenue.
With Curie, things are further complicated by soliciting public submissions - a daunting task to keep the channel from slipping into yet another link-promotion spam channel. For the purpose of this post, I'll assume the curation guild has selected curators, rather than being totally open to submissions from anyone.
The Curation Guild System
Much of the current processes can be automated and consolidated into a single frontend.
Communication
There should, of course, be a communication channel between the curators, voters, management and voting power donors. To be fair, this can be easily achieved off-site on Steemit.chat or similar, but it would be nice to have this built into the system.
Filtering posts
Curation guilds will have criteria and guidelines of their own. Specifically these can relate to a number of parameters -
- Tags
- Author's Reputation
- Author's recent earnings
- SBD generated already
- Time elapsed / remaining on post
Etc.
These parameters should be easily adjustable. There should also be a tolerance parameter, which might offer some leeway should a post meet most guidelines and not some, etc.
Straight away, this will filter posts down to posts that meet the guidelines. @jesta had a page filtering down Curie's qualifying posts, though of course, our guidelines are constantly in flux.
The curator will only see posts that meet the guidelines, no longer having to dig through the New page.
Plagiarism detection and author's history
There are many APIs available which will detect plagiarism automatically. The best ones are commercial, but we could start off with a free to use solution.
Curators can then verify if the post is a false positive, and if not, pass on it. These posts can automatically be passed on to anti-plagiarism guilds like Steemcleaners.
Curators should also get an easy slide-out menu that'll list the author's recent history. Each author should also have an internal set of notes that curators can follow. (For example - "Go with a lower 25% vote for this authors' XYZ series")
Parallel curators
When Curie first started, there were over 3,000 posts per day or 125 posts per hour - an amount hard for a single curator to keep up with. At the time, the price of Steem was high enough to pay parallel curators, who work at the same time. This is of course, no longer feasible, but a system like this must be built into the CGS (if I may call it so).
There are two ways parallel curation can be achieved - through division of posts or division of labour. The latter is when one person filters and short lists posts, but I feel this process can be automated, as mentioned above. This is the process we used to operate with at Curie.
So, we'll focus on division of posts.
Each time, curators can sign on (with their Steem account) for curation sessions. When there are two or more active curators at the same time, posts are distributed to each curator's feed.
Each curator will only see posts allocated to them on their feed. For example, if the last three posts are A, B, C, D and E; Curator 1 will get A, C and E, Curator 2 will get B and D.
Curator's parameters
This can be further expanded where each curator has their own set of parameters and guidelines. For example, Curator 2 may only want to curate posts from the #news tag. So if post A was #news it'll now show up on Curator 2's feed, instead of Curator 1 as above.
By attaching parameters to curators, we can best organize and divide curation effort in a way that's enjoyable to curators. Needless to say, that's when curators will be at their most efficient.
Voter's feed
Once a curator is happy with a post, they can hit submit. These selected posts are then passed on to the Voter's feed.
Like curators, voters can sign in for a voting session. They'll be greeted with a list of posts pending verification and vouching. The feed will be pretty much identical to the curator's feed with the same information about plagiarism, author etc.
If the voter seconds the curator's pick, they choose a voting strength and hit "Vote!".
Voting power management
Before we get into what happens next, let's deal with voting power management - a crucial part of any curation guild and one that causes us many headaches over at Curie.
When a voting power donor wants to donate / delegate their votes to a guild, a smart contract is created (more on this later). The voting power donor can specify a number of votes or a voting power limit for the guild. For example, whale Y wants to donate only 20 votes to the guild. Or use 25% of their voting power. Or use all voting power, but maintain it above 70%.
A curation guild may have dozens of voting power donors with endless permutations of voting power limits. The CGS, then, should take all voting power, and compute the most efficient way to use them dynamically. The CGS will automatically assign the correct strengths. If the CGS is voting on many different posts, the average voting strength will be lower, and vice versa, automatically.
So when a voter decides to vote on a post with X strength, the CGS will compute the right strengths across all different voting power donating accounts and transact directly with the blockchain. (Which also solves another major issue of bots siphoning curation rewards)
Of course, the algorithms for this voting power management system need to be worked out.
Contracts with voting power donors and reward sharing
When a user decides to delegate their voting power to a curation guild, they enter into a smart contract. The voting power donor may have some subjective requests, but more objective ones can be tracked by the CGS. The voting power donor may not want to vote on certain tags or for certain authors. So whenever a vote is submitted for the above, the particular user's voting power is excluded.
More importantly, sharing curation rewards will be the primary source of revenue for the curation guild. This will bypass using hacky methods like generating revenue off posts or witness rewards.
The curation guild and voting power donor may negotiate a proportion of reward sharing. I realize they are not really a donor if they don't sign a 100%-to-guild contract, but this is up to them.
An important matter that I'm undecided on is how the curation rewards should be calculated by the blockchain. Should all the guild's combined R-shares be seen as one vote? Or should there be a series of votes from the different users? In the case of the latter, should donors opting for the lowers reward (i.e. most to curation guild) vote first? I'm not sure about this, and would love some feedback. I'm leaning towards the entire guild's R-shares go straight as one vote. So if Curie votes on a post, there will only be one mega-vote by @curie, and the total curation rewards are then split internally. However, I think there's a simpler solution here which I'm overlooking.
Accounting and budget management
Lastly, we have accounting. This can be handled pretty easily by the CGS - voter's and curator's get paid directly based on their contributions. The curation guild may choose to employ fixed fees for each find and vote, or a dynamic one based on the guild's revenues.
Currently all curation rewards are paid out in SP. While this is mitigated somewhat by the 3 month power down, curation guilds have daily operational expenses. Thus, the rewards must be paid out 50% liquid / 50% SP - the same as author rewards.
Lists and live feeds
This one is also easily done. Each post by the guild should show up on their curation page. Users on Steemit can follow votes made by the curation guild, both in real time, and as periodic reports. There can be a variety of different stats the CGS can compute.
Of course, the guild can choose to make these private.
Comment curation
One aspect of curation this system doesn't really account for is comment curation. This one's a bit tricky and will need a solution of its own.
Is it worth it?
Everything mentioned here may seem pretty grandiose for such a miniscule community - it is. Sure, the entire extent of the system mentioned is neither feasible nor necessary today, but it can be built step by step.
For me, curation is the one universal selling point of Steem/it. Sure, authors get paid, but there's ample incentive for authors on other social networks. They may not be rewarded by money, but they are with attention, audience and engagement - which may be more valuable than money for content creators. But no major social network rewards curators.
Of course, it has very many other benefits like retaining authors, offering greater exposure to deserving posts, and getting bots in line.
The Trending page still remains a challenge, but here's my final suggestion. Curation guilds can have their own reputation system, and the Trending page can be influenced more by the votes of the most reputed curation guilds than the raw number of SBD generated. Either that, or a separate "Curated" page.
Listen up, everyone. He may well be the most experienced curator on Steemit and he's come to these conclusions over months of experience. These are some very sound suggestions which the community should discuss.
Interesting post. I'll be processing all this. One thing is sure, all new Steem users would gain a lot from knowing about curie and how to use it. I'll eventually solve this giving curie the highest priority in the revision of my Ultimate Guide to Steemit. Keep it up guys!
Thanks for all this information on how your process goes, and how it can be implemented into steemit to make it better for the platform, like the trending page. Good ideas.
Great post. Thanks for all that you have already done to help reward content creators. You have already done a huge service for steemit. And now you are thinking of ways to make it even better. I would love to see these ideas put in place!
Read till the end! :) Note: In Parallel Curator Section you said, "Curator 2 will get B and E" ... It should read 'Curator 2 will get B and D. Peace!
Good spot! Thanks :)
What a great post about something that I have also been waiting to hear about.
I am mainly a content creator who curates because I am at the computer anyway. I am good at it and I am good at finding new stuff and have also been working in the abuse channel with finding plagiarists. But mainly I am a content creator that has to rely on the odd Curie vote for my drawings and comic-pages. I would like to be part of a guild, I would be glad to lend voting power into it, and to invest some steem in it too. But my question is, will I be able to receive an up-vote from the guild when I am a member? My main thing is drawing and story-telling and that will have to have precedence for me.
That's an excellent question! I'm sure some curation guilds will form that'll basically share voting power between its donors. @crowdfundedwhale already has a similar model, I think. I deliberately left out a bit about automated curation as that's still a thorny subject. But I don't see why the CGS cannot also have automated voting on certain authors etc.
Well, it is of course what you internally decide, and if you have Whale-support what they will agree on.
I would like to make a guild with the best artist here on Steemit, but my technical abilities are not that big, and I am sure that it goes for most of the other artists. Do you have any advice as to how you go on with this?
Currently there's no system for guilds. As for advice, it depends on what kind of guild you want to set up.
Admirable work here @liberosist. This is an incredibly valuable (and healthy) set of rules to make steemit curation more sustainable. I really like the idea of having curation guilds be categorized with a different rep. score... maybe one day they could also be grouped according to different hierarchies or themes (i.e. art, writing, tech etc...)
Unofficially, that's already there - Steem Guild has special sub-guilds for photography, different foreign languages etc.
For an automated system, like I mentioned they can definitely be set by Tags. Of course, tags are pretty rudimentary right now for differentiating content. Maybe in the future if we have a substeem system, that could tie in to the CGS.
This is maybe a bit of a tangent - but you might like this project called "Azone Futures Market" - from a curation perspective they've done an interesting job in visualizing their daily influx in tags/topics... if the steemit tags evolve a bit maybe we could begin building some visualizations to get a curatorial eye on the scope of information that people are posting in a given day / week / month / year.... http://azone.guggenheim.org/
That's really interesting! Thanks for the link.
Very useful !!
Don't know how I missed this earlier. Thank you for sharing your insights:)
I disagree with the idea of curation guild being like an organization that profit from curation. As you mentionned voting donors will enter a guild through a smart contract, why the need for a middleman? How can people be guaranteed that they will be paid for curation? This sound terribly wrong to me.
I totally agree with this. There is a saying that goes like " 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk "
This means that curation rewards will be the main way for 99% of the users to earn something. In the future I predict we will have to adjust % ratio between author reward/curation reward. I expect curation rewards will be a lot higher than author rewards.
In my opinion curation guilds should be trustless and not controlled by anyone and should be integrated within the interface so that anyone can enter with a mouse click and no specific knowledge. Also it is very important to rewards curators individually for their curation talents than rewarding everyone in the pool equally, if you rewards people based on the guilds performance you lose incentive for people to do good curation.
Perhaps you misunderstand - curators will be paid directly from the guild's revenues, and it will all be done automatically by the CGS (see the bit right above your quote).
Also, if a guild decides to be a for-profit organization, that is totally within their right. There may also have other expenses to cover.
If you don't like a guild that is for-profit, simply don't join it. Join one that distributes 100% of its revenues to curators. (Said revenue being curation rewards earned via the voting power donors)
It's not the for profit that bothers me it's the fact that curation payments are at the mercy of those who control the guilds. The whole point of the blockchain is that we can automate these rewards in a trustless way without a middleman taking a cut.
And it is automated. See above. No one's payments are ever at the mercy of anyone. I think I was pretty clear about that!
Ok so every rules of the guild is written in a smart contract and run by code?
Precisely. Everything is automated. Once the rules are set for a guild, all rewards are distributed automatically.
Well, not everything - some things like co-ordinating and negotiating with voting power donors, recruiting and managing curators, schedules and budgets of course require human effort.
Answering to the last message here.
Can you explain how exactly these guilds work.
From my understanding voting donors give their posting key to a few individuals who then vote for the post they like. I fail to see how the current guilds allow everyone to participate/curate and benefit from donors' voting power.
Do these guilds give out the posting key of donors to every curators? Even this wouldn't make sense actually as there is no way to allocate same amount of power to every curators by doing so...
See the section "Today's curation guilds". Some donors give their posting key, which we then set up bots for. While others prefer to manage their own bots. Votes are made by proxy accounts, which then trigger the whale votes indirectly. Each proxy account has a different combination of donor accounts (which is in flux) to maximize available voting power.
To me the idea of curation guild was basically users entering a pool, the total voting power of this pool is then split equally between all the users of that pool, this means that users with low voting power can earn more curation rewards and inactive whales can still earn rewards from curation . However I am not sure how you make this happen without a code specifically design to do that? When the founders spoke about curation guilds my understanding was that they would build this piece of code and that it would be trustless.
Sure, you can create an open, free-for-all curation guild under this system, but I can bet not a single whale will donate their voting power willy nilly. They'd only delegate it to a trusted curation guild. You don't have a trusted curation guild if it's free for all, everyone voting how and as they please. So there will need to be people managing the guild, who decide whether a curator is given the permission to vote on their behalf.
Everything written in this post is a specification proposal for a system. Of course, this would need to be coded.
Are proxy accounts manual curators' account or bots? If the latter I don't see how normal users can benefit from such guild.
If I want to curate for a guild what is the process to enter and how do I earn more curation rewards than I would with my current voting power?
That's up to the guild. For example, with Curie, all votes are manual, and vouched by two people. But there could be an automated curation guild just as well, in which case curators will be bot developers. Basically, the system should allow for all kinds of guilds.
If you want to curate for a guild, it can either be a free-for-all guild where you can just register and start voting, or a moderated/managed guild. For the latter, you'd have to negotiate/convince with the managers of your curation skills.
Currently, Curie has a public submission channel #curie at Steemit.chat. Curators are paid 8 Steem per post. I haven't written about how the CGS can handle public submissions which are then approved by curators/voters, but that could be worked into it as well.
How many curators does curie have roughly and do these curators vote with their own account which then triggers the whales account?
What do you mean vouched by 2 people?
8 steem per curated post? this number seems a bit off no? 8 steem per post is basically the average curation reward of a whale, so if this is divided among many curators it would be a lot less unless there are very few curators.