RE: How Does Steemcurator01 Support Affect Authors' Behavior?
I pick up two interesting topics in the comment thread. Lots to say, but I'll try to keep this as short as I can.
Topic 1: Is it good to incentivize powering up? There's a little more to it than this: "Since we cannot influence demand, the only way to increase prices is to reduce production. As @chriddi points out, beyond powering up, another way to influence supply is through use of the @null account. It used to be that there was a promoted posts category that could be accessed by sending to @null. Unfortunately, curators never supported it, so it never gained traction, and now it seems like it has entirely stopped working. I would love to see what would happen under the following circumstances:
- Capability for post promotion gets restored
- Setting @null as a beneficiary also gets a post added to the promoted feed.
- Steemit displays promoted posts in a prominent location on the web site.
- @steemcurator01 and other curators support (deserving) promoted posts with upvotes.
Personally, I have my own (non-bid) voting bot set to vote at a higher percentage if @null is set as a beneficiary.
Also, it's an open question for me as to whether more powering up is necessarily better. I like to track it because I think it reflects the market confidence in the blockchain, but a thing to remember is that more powering up could mean more voting competition and lower curation rewards, which may discourage investment. By powering up, we are - in fact - also influencing demand. I'd love to see a statistical analysis on the relationship between powering up behavior and the price of the token, but I consider it an open question.
Topic 2: On the inevitability of bidbots. I agree with this point from @the-gorilla:
So there's little chance of downvoting bidbot users away in the way that Hive does or perhaps Steemit used to for the sad reason that almost all of the most powerful users have delegated to them.
Personally, I'm not opposed to bidbots. I'm opposed to improper valuation of posts, no matter how it happens. So my problem with the current generation of bidbots isn't that they exist, it's that they do a really lousy job of valuing posts.
Instead of viewing it as an us vs. them dynamic, I'd love to see some entrepreneurial minded people come up with a generation-2 bidbot that does a better job at valuing posts and can outcompete generation-1.
I could say a lot more, but I've already missed my goal of keeping it short, so that'll be it for now. Thanks for the interesting post and the thought-provoking discussion.
I am happy that my post provoked such a wonderful discussion. Thank you for joining.
Topic 1. I really liked the idea that authors could promote your post by sending STEEM to @null account. This is one of those healthy ideas where there are no losers.
But who should implement it? Obviously, if we wait for Steemit Inc, this will never happen. I am convinced that their position is that the community itself should initiate change and implement it. Therefore, this change must be developed by community programmers. I wonder if there is anyone among us who is capable of this?
Topic 2. Some time ago, I had a discussion with @ the-gorilla about bid bots. No matter how you treat them, there is no denying the fact that their actions are destructive to the platform.
Then I told @the-gorilla that if we can't beat the bots, we need to lead them. We need to create a bid bot that would distribute voting depending on the quality of the post. Then the authors would compete for writing the best possible post.
But @the-gorilla rightly noted that this requires the creation of an algorithm, and any algorithm can be deceived. In addition, such a bid bot would be interesting only to those authors who have little SP, because for the quality they could get a big vote. All whales would continue to delegate their SP to upvu, which calmly gives a big vote for the two-word post.
Can I ask a question? If you don't against bid bots, why don't you delegate all your SP to upvu?
Well, it used to work, so whoever disabled it would have to reenable it. I'm not sure if that's Steemit at the API level or the witnesses at the blockchain level or both.
Absent that, it would be easy enough to jury rig a "poor man's version" by just creating a community or specifying a tag like #clubsteemburner and giving the community/tag curation support. Club members could set @null as a beneficiary, which is easy enough to verify with a mouse-over, or they could transfer to @null and copy/paste a screenshot of the transfer into a comment. The crucial thing is to have curation support for the initiative.
True enough, but I don't see that as an obstacle. Google built their whole business on top of their PageRank algorithm. The whole job of steem curation is basically just that - ranking the posts and comments by perceived value. Adding the "bid" component is basically like selling advertising. Sure, an algorithm can be gamed, but the important questions are whether it's better or worse than what we have now, and can it be improved when the inevitable flaws are revealed?
In the end, just like Google's search algorithm and Facebook's news feed, I'm convinced that for Steemit to grow to scale, curation needs to be a symbiotic combination of human and machine.
I do have the beginnings of an idea for a generation-2 type of bidbot that might flip around the incentive structure, but I need to think more about it before discussing it publicly.
I guess two main reasons: First is that I think the current version of bid bots are dragging down the price of Steem because they are so spectacularly bad at ranking/valuating our posts; and two is that I run my own (non-bid) bot on behalf of myself and some people who I know personally. It's far from perfect, but I think it does a better job than the bid bots at valuing posts. In fact, I think the combination of [me + the bot] does a better job than I would do by myself. So yeah, it doesn't pay as well as delegating to a bidbot, but it's not terrible, and I believe that it's putting a tiny amount of upward pressure on the price of Steem.
Ecency (Hive) has the opportunity to promote your post for 1 - 3 days, spending points on it. I like your idea to do something similar here, only the payment would be to send STEEM to the @null account. I wonder if @the-gorilla (@coding-gorilla) could implement this feature in its new interface.
I was an active editor of Wikipedia for some time. I really like how automation there serves to help people, and does not spoil the encyclopedia itself. In Wikipedia, bots only help people, generate checklists, or tag articles. The final decision rests with the human.
I am sure that Steemit will never exist without bots. But now the bots are destroying it. Therefore, your idea of the next generation bid bot sounds like an acceptable consensus.
In order to be able to give a big vote, this bot can not vote for everyone. He should vote only for the best articles. The number of delegated SP can only be one of the auxiliary ranking factors.
It should work something like this. The authors pay, say, 5 STEEM per month and take part in a contest for a large bot vote. If their post is of sufficient quality, the bot will vote by a large vote for it.
A regular small fee will allow you to constantly increase the power of such a bot and eventually depend less on delegation.
It would be desirable to agree on a strategy for creating such a bot in advance with the Steemit team, so that people do not lose potential support for SC01 when using this new bot.
Before they switched chains, SteemPeak also had a way to promote posts, and they would insert the promoted posts into people's feeds. The higher the promotion amount, the more feeds it would get stuffed into.
I don't remember if that worked by sending to @null, or if they had a different payment mechanism. I'm thinking that they took a percentage and burned the rest, but I don't remember for sure. At any rate, I'm confident that it would be possible for @the-gorilla (@coding-gorilla). It's probably not something that would get included in a proof of concept, though, I guess.
It will be interesting to hear his opinion.
@remlaps, @o1eh - it would definitely be possible technically. The downside being that at the moment, the API that I'm working with doesn't provide the ability to retrieve posts by beneficiary. So I'd have to loop through all active posts looking for @null, in order to display the promoted posts differently. Which would probably be very bad performance-wise.
It might be possible using Steem's own API but I don't know.
An alternative would be to perhaps include or insist upon the use of a #promoted or #null tag and retrieve posts with this tag instead - then checking that a beneficiary's been set.
Either way, a method for users to promote posts could be implemented which would require promotion on how to promote posts 🙂
I've answered a different question.
Yes, it would be possible to allow people to promote posts 🙂
Just to revisit some points, since it's been a long conversation. The original implementation of /promoted was done for people who transferred STEEM or SBD to the @null wallet. For performance, I guess it would be much faster to follow that model and check that wallet's incoming transfers instead of looping through every post to look for posts with beneficiary settings.
OTOH, the beneficiary never changes, so that's the kind of thing that you could capture once, the first time you look at the post, and never check again.
Finally, on the point about using a tag to signal promotion, the nice thing about this signaling method is that people could start immediately after curation support is available and the UIs could follow along when ready. In this case, the beneficiary method would probably be more convenient than the "transfer to wallet" method because curators can validate the setting with a simple mouseover (after the payout goes above 0.00).
A quick-start idea that just occurred to me is to set up an account to do a recurring automated post (burning a large percentage of rewards) to publish a list of posts that have been promoted via either/both of the above methods. If I can find some time during the next couple weekends, maybe I'll give that a try and just see what happens.
cc: @o1eh
Looking at the wallet makes a lot of sense. Paid-for-promotion where the "buyer" is sacrificing their stake in the knowledge that an auto-upvote won't follow. It's what bidbots should have been.
I'll be interested to hear how you get on - I'm struggling to make progress with most of my projects at the moment... motivation is lacking.
I said to somebody recently about the well known coding term "Garbage In, Garbage Out". I didn't realise it at the time, but sub-consciously I was referring to my work in writing Steemit a new front-end. What's the point in making something look pretty, when 90% of what it's being filled with is garbage. I started "blacklisting" certain things - e.g. #krsuccess but then I realised I'd be blacklisting so much. Too much. Too many users with too much content created purely for bidbots. Which led me to a selfish route - creating a VIP version of Steemit where users are whitelisted, not blacklisted. Your content is included by invitation only. Any abuse of that invitation removes those privileges. Getting users accepted could be a pain but... I could gamify it like the plagiarism game. A user applied, everybody has their own reputation to approve or reject an applicant.
I don't know. I'm exhausted thinking about it and it's destroyed all the motivation I had to work on it.