RE: What Are Your Thoughts On Curie? (A Community Survey)
As it stands, Steemit's curation rewards system is a complete misnomer. It heavily disincentives actual curation, instead encouraging users to pile vote on votes for the same people over and over again. (Unless you're a whale) This means we saw the same authors on the Trending page everyday. On the other hand, a ton of great content was being paid out with less than a dollar. It was a complete killer for diversity, which ultimately is what any social network thrives on.
The Steem ecosystem being decentralized is what makes Curie possible. The community recognised the issue, and worked on a solution. Our process may resemble more a Band-Aid than a well-oiled machine at this point, but it works. Curie has voted on 3,500 posts, and brought over 500 authors into prominence. A vast majority of these posts and authors would have been ignored otherwise.
Before Curie, a lot of authors were discouraged into leaving the platform, or worse still, descend into writing shitposts or posts about Steemit. Curie has given many authors the encouragement to keep going and persevere. Some have become much more confident and greatly increased the quality of their content as a result.
Looking forward, I'm eager to find out more about the Delegated Curation Guilds feature. I hope that will encourage more curation groups to form.
Ultimately, we can hope this leads to a diverse community of blogging and discussion on Steemit, which is absolutely crucial for its continued success. If a decade down the line Steemit has X million users and $X bn market cap, we'll know it wouldn't have possible without these curation groups.
Needless to say, all of this is simply my personal opinion.
I wonder why we have the same authors at the trending page everyday. Possibility is that they only like these authors and they dont like the rest of us minnows. Could it be?
I cant blame the whales if they use bots to vote because they also have a life out there and they could not just spend time watching every posts in the platform. Besides these whales are rich people and would we think rich people would let themselves stay for long in front of their stations and roam around the platform, no there not, 1 to 2 hrs is enough for them not unless they are working for the platform, but even so, thats why they use bots to handle the voting for them.
So the drive of every minnows in the community is to hope that we will be included in their bots vote list. That's all there is to it, because without them we cant expect to receive high value votes.
It's just how the curation rewards are designed. If a minnow votes on a post that no one else will vote, they will get no reward. If a minnow votes on a post that many larger accounts are voting on, they stand to gain something. So, if a whale chooses to reward an author consistently - which is absolutely fair - minnows, dolphins and even smaller whales see the pattern and front run the whales to cash in on curation rewards. Over time, these accounts get infested by hundreds of bots, and are basically a guarantee for the Trending post.
I don't blame anyone here - it's just that the curation rewards system does not achieve it's goal of "curation", rather disincentives it. Why vote on a good lost post (actual curation) when you can save your voting power and cash in on a post that you know is going to trend?
exactly!
Absolutely this. This has been a major focus on my part in the last couple of weeks and being able to scale my votes and distribute them more evenly among deserving contributors.
I am glad I ran into this thread and notice more users are doing something to prevent this going on the same way and that its making it harder for newcomers to really get into the Steemit Experience because some authors with same-ish content get voted up to trending several times per day.
scroll to bottom for TLDR
Wow, YES, thank you, exactly! I just joined Steemit recently with high expectations...so it's not surprising to be disappointed, but I think there's still incredible (maybe unprecedented since youtube) potential for this platform to really procure the best original content online. But as of now, thoughtless, lazy, subpart and simply pointless posts are on top, CONSISTENTLY.
But, the potential is still there and can be realized, because the basic idea of steemit HAS succeeded in getting the right attention from content creators. So the potential comes from the people who actually have remarkable skill, insight, or vision, AND the people who loved the concept of steemit and were dedicated to supporting it. So yea, it's awesome to see when these people get recognized--sincere thanks to curie.
I think some of the higher-ups are MISTAKEN when they assume people leave because they are DISCOURAGED that their content isn't upvoted--I mean, yea I'm sure that is the case with some--but I think more than that, when users see undeserving content consistently make it up there, they lose faith in the system and reevaluate whether steemit will be the one to execute the idea properly and go critical.
The solution is obvious, because the whole thing is pretty simple (just look at how quickly and how many people have identified the same specific issue). At the most fundamental level, the problem is the misallocation of resources, which, due to visibility of upvotes/$, is instantly evident to the talent who come for those resources. The reason this misallocation is possible, is because there's no cost for upvoting. So why wouldn't you upvote a friendly's post--let's say, of his cat doing something he thinks is funny but it's really really not--when there's no cost, and it'll make them feel good! I mean, you'd have to be an asshole NOT to. The problem is, it's not the same as laughing at your buddy's bad joke, because no one else is competing for your free laughs.
A large part of a user's post visibility is due to their network. So when you have a user with a large network, and there is no cost to upvoting, even a small percentage of friendly--and really, just rational self-interested people that understand that more upvotes given to their network will be reciprocated eventually--WILL INEVITABLY introduces HUGE DISTORTIONS when attempting to determine value. I mean, if you ran a high quality sushi place or steakhouse, you couldn't expect even your best friends to blow $1000 a week with you, EVEN IF you were offering the undisputed best for miles around (unless your restaurant also happens to offer the finest hookers and blow). There's a reason REAL capitalism is by far the most efficient system available for the purpose of directing resources into the most productive hands.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who can glance at a post's quality, upvotes, and then the author's network size, and very quickly work out where this is headed. So I do believe this issue is actually crucial in determining whether steemit will live up to its potential and needs to be handled ASAP--before awareness reaches the point when "slower-adopters" start asking their early-adopter friends whether steemit is just hype. It could be happening now, as I wouldn't really consider myself an early-adopter.
TLDR:
1. there cannot be ZERO cost for upvotes; there will be no effective and true measure of value; and eventually there will be no value offered by the system (no value greater than anything else that offers the same functions and has a larger/faster growing network), unless you had a 24/7/365 fully-staffed, well-compensated division doing nothing but going through and handpicking posts (value has to be added somewhere, it's not spontaneously generated from nothing). determining value requires the evaluation of costs/benefits versus alternatives. So...
NO COST -> NO VALUE -> NO POINT.
2. If curie's not an official steemit division, they should be, and also be given near the highest priority, until the network reaches the threshold (i mean, ideally it would be permanent since the best original content should always be the primary objective)
3. to offer the highest value to steemit, curie's highest priority (up there with gaining more influence within steemit, will probably have enough leverage soon) should be the identification of talent and the most effective distribution of incentives that results in retaining and attracting the best. I'd recommend stripping out or altering particular guideline submissions that are not geared towards that purpose. Also, the vetting process should establish criteria for identifying potentially outstanding contributors to follow up on (if not already in place), rather than solely focusing on only the submitted post. If a user is capable of producing a single post that displays the desired qualities, it's safe to assume they'll be able to produce at that level given sufficient incentives. Again, this is vital in the early stages when it's too easy for large networks to facilitate, and unfortunately incentivize, publishing bad content.
anyway, goodluck to you guys at curie, take pride in doing good work :)