RE: Compact Broadcast Node: Low Cost Infrastructure to support Keychain, Splinterlands, Steem Engine and Future Apps
I also caution against heavy downvoting and reducing trending values drastically, people came to steem in their droves when trending posts were $1000 plus, with the hopium that they would get a fraction of that, right now with the highest cream of the crop being $150 let’s say
The way to get (some) higher values is with less promotion. Let the occasional exceptional post get voted highly by the stakeholders. The more that is spread out by a lot of people buying promotion every day and the more the total pool is drained by people buying promotion every day, the less an exceptional post will be able to earn even if it does get exceptional support.
All of the other stuff you mentioned about multisig wallets, theoretical proof-of-human models, etc. its all great but has nothing to do with voting on the reward pool. I'm all in favor of Steem not being a one-trick pony (which is why I'm totally in support of applications like Steem Monsters which don't rely on the reward pool at all, will be in favor of strong SPS proposals to work on multisig and such, etc.), and I would add to that promotion models other than using rewards (including some of the ones you mentioned), but as long as the reward pool does exist, and is a signature feature, we should also make the most of it, not abuse it for promotion.
The problem is actually vote apathy, you can put out all the great tools you like but if whales have busy work lives they won’t use them
Whales with busy lives can delegate to curators instead of vote-selling.
Or just not vote, which distributes influence to those with less busy lives. The less prevalent it is for everyone to monetize their votes, the less critical it becomes to monetize all of yours in order to keep up. Just being a passive investor relying on Steem price appreciation is a lot more viable. Which is a good thing because for most of the world of investors out there we want to attract, that's what they want, not needing to participate in some convoluted scheme involving vote selling.
I'd like to chime in and add that the curangel announcement reached 3rd trending before it was featured by steemit solely through organic votes. By coincidence I added one with ~380k stake that was delegated to the project right after that (I didn't expect it to return to me in that moment, perfect timing), but I doubt it would've been necessary for that to happen. If you have some followers and a post that people really see as valuable, there is no need for promotion at all.
Thanks for your tireless engagement smooth!
Good input!
Atm the 'NEW' section is not very busy, content creation has dropped alot so it is easier for good content to be seen and upvoted by the few people we have active with any decent stake, if/when Steem becomes busy again alot of authors are going to fall through the cracks, post promotion helps them get visibility above the rest. Another idea is burning SBD or Steem to get a featured slot on Steemit.com or some trending page ranking.
You seem desperate to justify your business model as something useful, which it simply is not.
Earlier you said whales are too busy with other things, now they're suddenly scrolling "new". Both is wrong. Trending topics happen through word of mouth. Nothing goes viral by itself, it happens because people talk about it on multiple channels.
A lot of things fall through the cracks. That's how it is on the internet. To become successful, you need to build an audience and have that show your work to others. You can write the most hilarious tweet or produce the most awesome youtube video, if you didn't build a follower base to get into a network it will never be seen by anyone.
"Promotion" (buying votes) on steem was an abnormality, which let those who were willing to pay you guys the most money block the real trending topics. Without the downvote efforts of smooth and others, my post would have never had a chance to even make it to the first page of trending, as the votes it received would've been worth less, and the barrier to get up there would have been higher. You killed off the real trending.
There is an option to burn SBD to get a featured slot in the promoted section. Guess why nobody looks at it? For the same reason everybody kept saying "I don't look at trending" over the last years. Nobody wants to see shit which gets shoved into their face. The argument of providing visibility is a marketing slogan, nothing else. It might work if the interface put an occasional promoted post between organic content, but the way it was only helped you (and delegators, which includes me after I gave up and supported ocdb as "the lesser evil" eventually) to make a lot and the buyers to make a little more steem.
I would argue that tagging is still essential. Steem does not allow for much discovery without tagging potentially interested people. It can be annoying, but right now its that or some other annoying technique to gain community awareness.
No idea, I don't tag and I certainly don't react to being tagged. I may have a look at it when I'm bored and check Steemworld for mentions, but I don't vote then because I don't want to encourage that behavior.