Steemit Journey - Should the number of views be factored into reward calculation?
Hi Steemians! This will be a short post as I just had this sudden thought and will like to discuss it with all of you. I was researching on how to stake QTUM on a Raspberry Pi and stumbled upon this informative post by a fellow Steemian (@cryptominder). It described in detail how to stake QTUM on a Raspberry Pi and it is the first result that showed up on Google.
Before you click on that link, I will like you to guess how much reward did @cryptominder receive for that post. Clue, this post had over 15,000 views. Next, I also found another of his post with almost 17,000 views. Again, before you click on the link, guess how much he received as reward. Will you be surprised if both his/her posts received less than 2 SBD worth of rewards? I was indeed surprise when I saw them.
That leads me to the point for this post, should the number of views be factored into reward calculation? I think it makes perfect sense to consider the total number of views when calculating reward payout. This will further incentivize users to create top-notch content on Steemit. If we do not, I am afraid that we will be losing such quality content over time. For this case, I think @cryptominder might have moved on to another platform as he has not been posting for 4 months.
So leave your comments, do you think the development team should update the reward calculation algorithm to consider the total view count?
p.s. I am planning to start staking QTUM on a Raspberry Pi as a side project. Will blog about my experience when I get it running. So stay tuned!
I agree.
I even created a calculation to fix the Trending / Hot pages that included views, because that affects the true popularity of the article as oppose to people voting without reading or using bots.
Idea on Improving the Trending Feed
Great idea! I should really be digging through your older posts to get more inspirations :p
I think at the very least, there should be another list/feed to show the most viewed articles based on different intervals. Perhaps top views in past 7 days, 30 days, 1 year and all time can be featured in the list.
Number of views are platform dependent. On Steemit, only those views will be counted that accessed the Steem blockchain using steemit as front-end. But if that post was visited with some other front-ends like Busy or Chainbb, it won't count.
Secondly, all those views are not from Steem users. When a non-Steem users visit that post, say from Google or elsewhere, that too will be counted as a view.
Thirdly, if you yourself keep visiting your post, it will be counted as an additional view each time you refresh your page. Thus, it's not taking unique views into account.
Finally, the views you quoted here are of a post which is several months old while the reward is decided for the first seven days only. Views will get counted even for the visits post-7-day period.
And by the way, where do you get to see those views? I ain't seeing any view-counts for some days on Steemit 😉.
Yea, I have also noticed that the view count feature is removed from Steemit. I am not sure why.
And you are right, the view count feature can be easily abused. What I hope for is a reward algorithm that really reward valuable content. And by valuable, I mean valuable to the general public and not to Steem users only. So the idea is to continue giving out rewards (can be of very small amount) if the post remains useful and viewed for as long as there are views.
As a programmer myself, I understand it is not easy to be able to track the actual unique views. But the point I am driving towards is that the incentives drive behaviors. If the system rewards are only based on post performance for past 7 days and participation of Steem users, then this platform will only see more of short-term posts that try to draw attention of Steem users. To me, those posts are generally low quality and unlikely to show up on Google searches. We will see less quality posts like, https://steemit.com/qtum/@cryptominder/qtum-staking-tutorial-using-qtumd-on-a-raspberry-pi-3
Which in my opinion is going to hinder the progress of the platform in the long run.
Maybe when they finally roll out SMT's, they can do a bonus token based on the view/upvote ratio.
I do hope so. But from the whitepaper, it seems that there won't be much customization allowed on the reward algorithm. In addition, I went to check the APIs and I cannot find a way to get content views through API.
If it is shown on Steemit, it has to be in the API somewhere.
Hmm.. Let me dig a little deeper.
So say we all!
And of course, my Even More of Life Isn't Fair and Neither is STEEMit pointed out how different people putting out the same post get different rewards.
Read both of your posts. I am so gonna follow you now.
on the other hand, take a look at this.
6 hours in, 72 votes, 10 views, out of which 3 were contributed by me and the commentor.
i think all these curation trail and auto voter are bad ideas
ah that is weird.. does it mean that voters are just voting from the homepage feed instead, and not entering into the post to view..
I never actually realised the view count and vote count might be quite off from each other until i read your post this time ahah
thats the result of curation trail or fan base.
people are just auto upvoting posts.
dont even need to go into the post.
dont even need to read them.
Yup, I think it is partly the bots and also people who just blindly vote from their feeds. It is probably due to how curator rewards are calculated. People will vote blindly for any posts from popular bloggers that they followed. As they know that any post from these guys will be upvoted by a lot of people, hence more curator rewards.
I agree with you Culgin that the Steemit algorithm should take into account the total number of views as an additional factor to the reward payout.
Steemit is still in beta mode or in the early days and I think the developers might tweak the code somehow if the majority of users support your notion. Upvoted!
Thanks! I really hope so. I think it will help to create a fairer environment for minnows and really reward quality content as pointed out by @deanlogic as well.
Upvote this post !
Comment I will do same
it is lovely nice post, best of luck dear, i am fallowing you
Thanks for your support.
HI, I do not know. Such cases seem completely unrealistic/weird. But it is probably quite difficult to integrate those numbers, I guess. Steemit only wants its users to decide whether something is good or not (worth upvoting or not).
Only if the amount of views rises when a Steemit user is responsible for this rise then it might work.
But nice post/thoughts culgin. (;
Hi my friend! It is not uncommon to see posts with high view count but low votes. I think this is because only people with Steemit accounts can vote. If the article is useful and is a top result on Google, there will be many others who would have viewed but were not able to vote.
Yeah, that is right. We will see if they change something or not concerning these cases.
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