Proposal to limit UPVOTE-GAMBLING: limit upvote power in thumbnail mode
Voting is the blood that runs in the veins of Steemit. However, the current system does not encourage people to actually READ the content of the posts. I'd like to discuss with you about a proposal for a solution.
As @dantheman mentionned in his Curation Rewards and Voting Incentive post earlier :
Voting is something you can do almost as often as you like. Once you reach a certain level of Steem Power, almost every vote puts money in your pocket.
I love to upvote, and I love Steemit for the quality of the content you can find. From the beautiful pictures in the photography challenge to articles helping me better understanding the blockchain and the alt-currencies, Steemit is a fantastic place to learn.
Today, no other Internet site comes as close in terms of content quality.
Unfortunately, I think that the site does not encourage us to actually READ most of the content we vote for.
On top of that, getting curation rewards, even as low as a minnow's rewards, can lead us to the use of gambling strategies to maximize our revenues:
The UPVOTE-GAMBLING, which consists in scrolling the "new" or "active" page and upvote posts we think will yield revenues:
- posts with already a bit or revenues around the 20-30min mark
- and/or whom author has a great reputation score
- and/or posts with clickbait titles or photos
Doing this, we often do not even READ the posts we vote for.
To limit such behavior, and try to incentive users to READ the content, I propose the following:
- Limit the upvote-power (hence the potential curation reward) by 50% when a post is upvoted in thumbnail mode.
- Only when the post is "open" the full potential of the upvote is applied when clicking on the button.
Even if some users will open the post and scroll down to get the "full-upvote", it can still make them read the beginning of a story, and maybe lead them to read the entire story, at list a few pieces. That's a good start.
On top of this, this will give an advantage to advanced curating bots, which @datheman believe are the future of Steemit:
Most existing robots (except cheetah) do not look at the content, but instead attempt to guess on what other robots and voters will do. There is some risk that the game could evolve in such a way that content is ignored completely as bots up vote based upon what other bots do.
Such bots would have to read (parse) the full content of the post in order to be able to use their "full-upvote".
For the record, @brunopro wrote a great post 2 weeks ago about the rise of bots. Read it if you have 5minutes, it's interesting.
And I love one of the last sentences, which I will conclude with.
(message from the content creator (ME): if you reached this far in the text, congratulation to you! you rock because you're really using the platform and reading content! thanks and remember to upvote if you like my stuff!)
EDIT: The post triggered some very interesting comments, like the one of @mark-waser below.
As @brunopro also pushes for, @mark-waser 's proposal is simply to REMOVE the upvote button in the newsfeed.
Users would have to get into the posts to be able to upvote.
It's a bold move and it does have advantages:
- it will have a strong and immediate impact on the reading behavior.
- implementation would be extremely simple from a developer's point of view.
If I like the concept, my only fear a this stage would be regarding the liquidity of the STEEM currency, especially if you ask whales to read every post.
me if you enjoyed this post. I am happy to discuss this proposal in the comments section.
Until they remove the UPVOTE from the main listing the TRUE curation will not happen. It makes no sense what so ever having those buttons there, it only incentivizes the Upvote without reading or even without viewing the post/article.
I wrote about this 4 weeks ago: Proposal: For quality content sake - REMOVAL of all UpVote buttons on the listing pages
I would still give a reward for the Newsflow votes.
The reason is simple: steemit blogging exists to supprt the STEEM currency.
Therefore, liquidity has to be present.
Being too harsh and removing the newsfeed upvote may pose a problem in terms of liquidity. My proposal is therefore to limit it.
Thanks for your comment. You have a new follower.
To be honest. I think if you are able as curator to detect good quality content (whatever the methods you are using) it is ok for me.
I think the proposal might hit technical obstacles in such an implementation. It could prove very problematic to penalize users of steemit.com compared to a modified steemit client running on one's PC that doesn't have this penalizing behavior.
What technical obstacles? A nearly trivial implementation is just to remove the up-vote links from the trending and feed pages . . . . If this were my website, I could do it in no time at all and these devs are far better than I am.
Yes, someone could put out a client that then allows this "evil" behavior -- but like all evil behavior, it is self-defeating to use such a client. I will admit that I used to be guilty of such behavior -- until I found that I had much better accuracy and got much better rewards when I didn't do it (admittedly, at the cost of a little more time -- but with the benefit of actually reading good content).
No I'm not talking about the button removal. I'm talking about the fact that the software for the site is already able to be downloaded and run locally. So if you run the software locally, you'd have no such restriction.
So one group suddenly doesn't have the capability, the other has. Admittedly the second group is lesser in numbers but the power-voters (whales and dolphins) even vote from ...cli or bots or have slider bars that ordinary voters don't have. So in effect this voting change would typically alter the behavior of small voters who don't matter much anyway.
Technical solution is to create a sort of 2 upvotes buttons. (It's a bit violent and not-refined but...good news, it kind of already exists !!).
The devs already implemented a solution for whales to upvote with limited power, it should be technically feasible to adapt this feature. ( @piedpiper 's latest post talks about this vote slider)
Most people won't use a modified Steemit client, even if there was one available.
By having it on the main Steemit site, it'll at least affect 90% of people.
...but not 90% of the vote power... Because this 90% is typically the demographics whose vote is pretty weak... Perhaps it has an accumulated weight of 10-20%?
So, as discussed, I put a link to your post on my most recent post (https://steemit.com/steemit/@mark-waser/dantheman-s-power-down-countdown-x-days) as one of the best three posts I've read today. Hopefully, it will help you get some traction.
Upvoted. I wrote about this issue here and it is still something of a hobby-horse for me. The system needs to be tweaked to encourage more sincere voting practices.
I've only been on Steem a few days and I don't understand most of the technical stuff, how the payments work etc, but I have to say I'm truly amazed that there was no mechanism in place to prevent people from upvoting posts they don't even read the day Steemit was launched. Of course, that could just be me and the non-techie world I live in, but in the world I live in, what gets done is what gets rewarded, so you make sure from the outset that what's rewarded is what you actually want to get done.
Very helpful post @sebastien - thanks.
This post has been linked to from another place on Steem.
Learn more about linkback bot v0.3
Upvote if you want the bot to continue posting linkbacks for your posts. Flag if otherwise. Built by @ontofractal