RE: Programming Diary #29: Imagining the "value per feed" curation model
(rewards + audience) > rewards alone
I think you need to think about ROI from their perspective. For the people using these services today an audience is largely irrelevant (or maybe even counterproductive, for the most egregious abusers), they're mostly in it for the low-effort returns. Writing something good enough that an audience would appreciate it is hard work. I doubt you're going to be able to bribe people out of their current extractive business model. And there's not enough audience on the chain to be able to sell "visibility" here to anyone outside, and a pay-to-play structure is actively alienating to normies (the first incarnation of the bid-bot had this effect on several people I know who left the chain in disgust once they understood what was happening).
Maybe it is possible to have a voting-bot business model that isn't corrosive, but my guess would be that it's always going to be a problem because it runs against the basic "proof of brain" value proposition of the chain.
Agreed. They're definitely not the target clientele for the next-generation voting services.
The point is to support legitimate content creation so that it becomes more profitable than the currently dominant model. There's a whole world full of audience who can be brought to bear with the right incentive structure. Stakeholders who don't want to see their stake devalued have plenty of reasons to find that incentive structure. Just because no one has found it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. In fact, since the audience exists, I think that the incentive structure must also exist.
This is a laudable goal, but I'm skeptical that vote-bots are the way to do it. And since the current vote-bot business models are already very efficient at extracting a big chunk of value from the rewards pool I'm skeptical you can outgrow them, even if you figure out a more virtuous model.
Does it? My read is that view counts were disabled because they were embarrassingly low, and traffic to the site overall has probably dropped even further since then. Relative to other internet sites I don't think there are a lot of people here, so there's not enough eyeballs to sell.
No doubt that it's a heavy lift, and it won't be me. I have no plans to run any paid voting services. But I have a hard time believing that someone with the right funding and motivations couldn't come up with a solution that wouldn't depend on clients to continuously cannibalize their own holdings. I'm just trying to imagine what a better solution might look like.
Certainly, there is no perfect answer, but I think that improvement is always possible.
Yeah, I agree with this. I'm imagining that content creators would be motivated to grow their audience by ambitiously promoting their own blogs outside the Steem ecosystem, just like they do for other platforms.
There's another wildcard in the mix, too. In about 1-2 years, we start to expect an increasingly sharper decline in creation of new STEEM per day. I'm not sure at all what that will mean for usage & ROI for the voting services (or organic usage, for that matter). It's going to be different from anything that we've seen in the past.
I don't find it hard to imagine that systems can get stuck in tragedy-of-the-commons traps where it becomes hard or impossible for individual actors to fix things. I'm not sure there's a person on the planet who has the resources to implement changes who would have the motivation "fix the Steem ecosystem". Why would they? They could probably do more good more profitably somewhere else.
I think improvement is possible, but you might be working on "let's invent a slightly-less-unhealthy soda for people to drink" when "drink water instead" is categorically better for that goal.
I'm guessing it won't matter, subtle macro effects tend to be small so I think other factors will tend to dominate.