Fixing DMania - A Compromise "To Leave Both Parties Equally Unsatisfied"
As usual, one of the great topics on Steemit, both across the platform and plastered across the top of Trending, is reward allocation. The topic of the day is Dmania.
https://steemit.com/steem/@berniesanders/dmania-is-bad-for-steem-time-to-take-this-shit-down
As Bernie notes, dmania has delegations from some of the absolute largest holders of Steem, including Ned the CEO, so it merits looking at closely. Perhaps there is a solution that will resolve the legitimate concerns about post quality while reconciling the (arguably regrettable) fact that meme'ing may in fact be "what the people want."
If you're not familiar with @dmania, I'll give you the summary from someone who has never used it nor read their FAQ firsthand. They pay you to post memes. An attempt is made to reward original and better memes first, and possibly, only. If your post is rewarded, you will relinquish some of your reward back to Dmania as a beneficiary.
You can post a lot of memes if you choose, 5 (or possibly more) per day. This means they have a lot to sift through. Far more than is practical for humans to be doing without some form of pay (which, I suppose, could hypothetically come from the beneficiary split.)
What's the problem? Well, MarkyMark said it in fewer words than I possibly could:
https://steemit.com/meme/@themarkymark/meme
In a few words: plagiarism and general shit-posting.
I have an idea that could certainly help.
When discussing this idea with the venerable @meno , we realized very few of these "Dmania miners" (as I'm generously calling them) actually have any investment in the Steem platform in their accounts. In other words, they are extractors of value from the network, not providers - in more ways than one. Meno lamented the fact that at least if they had some of their own SP (on average), they'd be funding the network they are pulling rewards from. I daresay this would be almost like a DPOS coin paying you your own staking rewards for meming!
Well, why not requires users who receive reward votes from Dmania to have certain SP thresholds powered up? Though not directly intended as an "abuser-filter", it will do the job of filtering out the vast majority of "extractionary" abuse from individual who provide no value (content- or investor-wise) to the Steem ecosystem.
I'm not suggestions this is a complete solution. It doesn't make plagiarism OK, nor prevent other forms of abuse such as multi-accounting to get around posting limits. Plagiarism is best handled with an easy reverse-image search, as noted by several of the posters I have cited above.
As I alluded to in my title, this is meant to be an easy-to-implement stopgap solution that will provide multiple positive benefits and maximal impact with minimal difficulty to implement. I would say it substantially increases the value of the dmania service overall, ensuring that only real contributors to the Steem network can benefit. It creates another little fringe benefit to holding Steem, and that is good for everyone who matters on this network - holders of Steem.
It won't be perfect, but perhaps it can make both sides equally unsatisfied.
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Disclaimer: This is not financial advice and I am not a financial advisor.
Sources: Google, @meno, @themarkymark, Bernie
Copyright: NorthFourthWall.co, Steemit, Steem
dMania... legitimizing lazy posts. Not a fan. @ironshield
Won't this make it so that whales only get bigger and that minnows have an even harder time? I don't care myself and am not on Dmania personally but I imagine this question may come up from smaller accounts.
Also, there is something counter intiutive to having a platform for memes that favors big investors... I mean... memes, are usually crappy. Not something that I would put a monetary pre-requisite into the thousands for.
I think a more fundamental solution is required from the steem devs... But I fear that we won't see any movement until competition arrives to give STEEM a run for it's money.
I don't think any whales are materially increasing their stake from Dmania.
This is simply to prevent people who add nothing to the platform from profiting and cashing out at low effort.
We're not really favoring big investors, just locking out those who contribute nothing. Have you looked at the size of the Dmania vote lately? Low percentages are not low reward.
"solution is required from the steem devs... But I fear that we won't see any movement"
Hence the need for suggesting such imperfect measures.
Incidentally, the numbers are arbitrary. You could cap it at 5000SP, or 1000SP. This would still knock out the vast majority of "abusers".
That's true, I'm sure many of the abusers have literally no SP. Hell, even just implement a 10 SP minimum might do quite something to combat this abuse
while reconciling the (arguably regrettable) fact that meme'ing may in fact be "what the people want."
i don't think this is an argument, it's a sad human condition that we want free will and libertarian values, to make our own poor choices like eating candy til our teeth rot, sitting on our asses, and believing shit without ever reading the facts.
this is why some people think government is needed. to protect citizens in a common social system from the stupid excesses of others who refuse to consider the ramifications of their choices.
people who live a clean responsible life put into the same health care kettle as people who choose to smoke drink and eat crap, then whine when they get sick and want their health care to pay?
there are always other factors, but at some point we need to find a way for setting aside poor decision makers in a common market.
Robert Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" - quality vs quantity, ie the choice between a durable or valued choice rather than a lot of LQ options. For many people its an economic decision pressed on them by the necessities of life, however with dmania, the market is overvaluing the LQ path to the detriment of high quality, thought provoking and informative content.
entertainment value is toppling sound judgment because people are too apathetic or jaded to make a decision without immediate gratification.
Well said. (and a good book recommendation)
Warning: This is just my personal opinion, don't judge me that hard for it :)
The purpose is better than good, but the approach is not very happy...
This limiting depending on SP does not favor newcomers at all, as we already have problems with user retention. I know it will be very effective, but dmania will be almost restricted to whales and minnows.
And yet, making the calculus, people that try to phish for votes will more likely use 200 accounts of 100 SP rather than just one of 20k SP, the upvotes are even more valuable in the first case than in the second one.
This was my honest opinion, hope you don't mind. Maybe some images recognition software (even searching images with Google* is pretty effective these days) could fix the plagiarism problem. And just have some mods reviewing the upvotes will be enough I guess.
*Google provides a searching for images API which could be investigated in this case. That's just a random suggestion :D
"This limiting depending on SP does not favor newcomers at all, as we already have problems with user retention. "
The numbers are arbitrary and could be lower or higher. The goal is not to prevent newcomers from participating. Newcomers can participate immediately if they invest in Steem.
If you don't want to invest in the platform, no free meme reward for you. Seems fair.
I am more concerned about INVESTOR retention than USER retention.
"This was my honest opinion, hope you don't mind."
Any civil opinion is always welcome here.
"Google provides a searching for images API which could be investigated in this case. That's just a random suggestion :D"
This has been suggested by others before both of us, and it has not been implemented. Those who run Dmania either do not have the resources to do so, or do not want to. Hence, we must suggest other roundabout solutions like the one I did above.
I'm a little baffled on the fact that I've read no one ever say this...
We keep on talking about user retention, I do so myself almost daily and it seems like we forget that without investment we would be sharing 100% of nothing at all.
I gave up pointing it out because I was tired of getting dog-piled by communists.
No, you are so right, we need indeed more investors here! Another fact is that this could not be a successful social media platform without plenty of users, but without investors, things can get really bad. I din't know if one thing is more important than the other, but it is true that we need more from both :)
Thank you for the information about dmania, I didn't knew all of these things, I am not so much into memes.
I applaud your attempt at compromise. In spite of what I think is your natural reaction to just let dMania burn (or I could be reflecting my thoughts on you :) ), you're at least willing to offer a solution.
I have nothing against memes. Some are quite funny. Especially original memes, or even memes that alter themes while using the same photo.
However, memes are meant to be
ripped offplagiarizedshared. So, I don't know how you get around that, even with an army of "quality control" police.That said, there's no way a meme is worth $40 and up. Personally, I don't think a single meme should be worth more than $0.25. It takes more for me to construct this comment than it does for me to find a meme on the internet and slap it on dMania.
So, again, I congratulate you on your restraint. You are far more a bridge builder in this case than I am.
If the people truly want this, then don't have it dump into Steemit or Busy. Give dMania its own tiny portion of the reward pool. Let it fester and then fail on its own.
Okay. That came out as pretty aggressive. Not sure how to tone it down, though.
"So, again, I congratulate you on your restraint. You are far more a bridge builder in this case than I am."
After watching Steemit for some time, I think we'd all be better served by less argument over rewards and more consensus building. I'm not a meme fan, but they can be funny, and it definitely helps bring in some audience which can be good for Steemit if they have to invest something before they can extract value.
Informative post! Thanks for the info. It's really useful.
Useful spam. Thanks for the spamming, it's really dumb.
Thank you, you've saved me a little bit of my snark reserve.
Anytime ;-)
We have to respect this information to reach more succeed
In a way I don't get it. Isn't every single meme in existence a form of plagiarism? If we couldn't put words over top of images from movies, politicians, cartoons etc. memes would not exist at all! How about no meme at all! Problem solved or not?
Well, original memes would be ones that someone didn't google up from somebody else's idea, then cut and paste.
For example, with that Nutella one...for one person that's original, for the rest, that would be plagiarism.
I am merely articulating the position of those making the complaints (of plagiarism). Don't shoot the messenger.
Or, since the Powers That Be have more choice in the matter, they could arbitrarily put some fix in to limit the dmania-style shitpost-mining. If, that is, they prefer quality content over "what the people [seem to] want."
Stake is always going to prefer whatever raises the value of stake most. We'll need to cater to that reality.
very necessary things