The EIP and how curation will matter again - a.k.a false hopes
Man was I hyped about the effects of the EIP. Bid bots getting hit left and right, abusers downvoted, people are full with hope for a better future on STEEM.
Well, about time for reality to kick in I guess. Maybe I need to thank @exyle for bringing me back on the floor? It took his latest post to make me realize I've been hovering on a cloud.
First, I was puzzled. 18% in curation rewards - that's about the same as a delegation to a bid bot before HF21 raked in. That can't be right, surely he had an error on his maths. Turns out, he doesn't.
My initial issue with the EIP was that we've been there before. We had a non-linear curve, and it lead to people automating their votes to get onto known high earning authors as soon as possible to maximize their rewards. With all the positivity surrounding me the last days, I shoved these worries to the side. Surely things will be different now, change in consciousness, community working together, right?
Screw it. We exchanged content indifferent voting with bid bots for content indifferent voting with trail bots. And those people have the balls calling their maximizing strategy curation. That's a slap in the face to the few real curators out there (shout out to the amazing curator team of @curangel!). It's a disservice to the platform to call it that, and it's poison to advertise the ROI you can achieve with it. Honest curation of the huge mass of undervalued content is pictured as a waste of votes, a bad strategy, and nothing to strive for.
I had a few moments the last days, wondering why no bigger delegations come in to curangel. Well, thanks again for pushing me into it with the nose. Who'd want to exist in a world where you can't get more than 10% for doing nothing.
I'd love to blame the new curve, and it surely does its part to not vote on small authors, as what they lose in rewards for not getting over the threshold is lost for the curator too. But the problem is so much bigger. After so many years, the big stakeholders still didn't understand that we need a growing community to gain value. All they look at is their own relative growth in steem. Who cares that the value is going to shit when you can tell yourself you made an ROI of 20%, right?
Sorry. Usually I only rant to myself and people close to me, but I needed to vent. We'll keep fighting windmills with curangel, and watch the platform go to shit thanks to the maximizers out there. Glad I won't see you on SteemFest this year.
I never understood why people thought these changes will increase manual curation ...
I mean, I can't throw stones, I don't curate that much myself, mostly just have my list of people that I know tend to post high-quality things and I trail steemSTEM. Not really profit-oriented, but also not that curation focused.
But the 50/50 split combined with the new curve is really bad for small/new authors. 50/50 takes away more from their reward, and the curve reduces the likelihood of them being voted at all.
That old circle jerks resurface doesn't surprise me. I think I've even registered a slight increase in votes on my posts, probably because I have a stable amount of autovoters that bring consistent curation rewards.
It's dumb. We're losing people we're not going to get back. It's easy for me to onboard new people (thanks btw for steeminvite, I use it a lot), but keeping them around? It's hard. If that doesn't change, STEEM won't be worth anything anymore at some point, and all the whales that tried to get a bigger and bigger piece will sit on their pile of worthless crypto.
I was going to add a comment myself, but @suesa, you said everything I was thinking. Yeah, I don't see brighter days ahead if we remain unable to keep people on the platform, and I don't see anyone really addressing this in a real-world, head-out-of-@$$ way.
I called it already 9 days ago:
https://steemit.com/newsteem/@isnochys/how-to-curate-in-newsteem-as-minnow
;)
I am more inclined to vote on potential high earner posts than new steemins just to save myself and recoup the "lost" earnings due to EIP @pharesim and I am sad about it.
I couldn't agree more:
They fight so hard to get the biggest parts of a cake which is getting smaller and smaller instead to try to increase the size of the cake!
The value of a (social) network is measured among others by the number of its users.
Therefore we all should try to support new and middle sized users to give them a reason to stay and also convince their friends to join as well.
Furthermore I think we should support 'normal' users who are writing about 'normal' stuff like food, traveling and everyday life. We won't attract the 'masses' by repeating 700 times how great STEEM is and then upvoting it. :)
ditto ;)
mass adaption is the key imho
if only geniuses with their perfectly written technical articles are to write here
how on earth do this platform resonate to its slogan ?
I simply don't have time to curate as much as I had in the past and frankly I'm still kind of sore about the yahoo-ery from before.
But I will be absolutely forthcoming about it. Honesty is perhaps my strength at times but can also be my fatal flaw.
My HF20/19 ROI compared to the bid botters had been low since back in the earlier days.
What do I have to show for it? It's not really in my wallet. Many of the heroes of today were the assholes of yesterday.
Throwing down a few downvotes does not negate all the former collusion. My worldview beckons me to forgive people but that is not easy as the circumstances are different than anything I experienced.
All the stake that was earned via dishonesty is now power influencing the ecosystem. It's not easy to forget as the effects still reverberate through the chain. On the flip side, a lot of the bot vote miners are selling us some discount Steem. Silver lining?
Where's the MIB memory eraser pen when you need one? 🤔
To clarify, I am playing around with an autovoter when I am going to be extended AFK.
As much as I care about honest curation, I also don't want to be left behind again. My saving grace before was Utopian and I busted my ass for those rewards.
Now, since that's gone, I have to think adapt and being an idealist didn't seem to work for me in the past.
There is a pull between what the system rewards and what I believe to be the ideal. Until the system matches the ideal, it is compelling to at least adabt a hybrid approach to voting (mixed auto and manual).
Personally, I think the ideal is if you don't have anything meaningful to vote. Don't vote. But let's be realistic. Who really is going to do that?
Is this wrong? I'm still thinking that through.
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I dropped it in the post a few times, but let me push you a bit harder towards checking out @curangel for those extended AFK times ;)
The returns are way better than nothing, and not much worse than a non-optimized autovoting setup. And you can be sure that your stake is used for the good of all the platform.
Did I do something wrong?
Lol. No. Sorry for being on that list, I added that caption a bit ago to make clear it's not about you.
Not your fault that you're successful! Or yes, absolutely. But it's nothing bad ;)
For you manual curators out there, keep your eyes peeled for this starting on Sunday. It's meant to give quality producers a second chance at some some eyes, at least. Check out the comment section. People seem to be excited about it. I have no idea if it's going to work or not.
I've always wanted to be on a Bad Boys List :D
I also felt wounded by the list. :) lol
I don't know what to say. I went from spending 2 years going in reverse, watching incoming support slowly and steadily decline to, quite suddenly, seeing an increase in support, which is something we all strive for here and that was to be an intended consequence of the potential positive feedback loop included with the EIP; all I did was post, nothing about me changed. I have 806 published posts. Eleven of them recently start to take off, after being here three years, doing my thing. Already, after eleven out of 806, people are complaining about who votes for who and why. Eleven posts and I'm seeing some of these names being thrown around like "circle jerkers" and "old boys club" yet I've always done my own thing and never made a deal with anyone for anything. I think I've voted for exyle's stuff maybe 10-20 times, out of nearly 27000 manual votes I've handed out. I'm grateful for this sudden show of support from all these people who decided to step up to the plate, after all this time. Eleven posts and my name is already caught up in community crossfire. The last thing I want is for people to start hating me because of these arguments. I don't want to lose support for the simple fact I gained support. All I did was post.
Again, nobody hates you, and nobody wanted to put you in crossfire.
You're in the list, because you've been continuously successful. Some people don't vote for you because what you provide, but because they can get better returns from voting on you than on others.
It's a systemic issue, nothing of that is your fault. Don't hate the player, hate the game is a popular saying. You're not even a player here, but part of the playing field.
I'm happy for you and the others in the list that they can take in some rewards for their continuous efforts. At the same time, I feel for those who weren't able to get the same kind of recognition.
A lot of the folks I vote for often don't see much, but they'd see less if I didn't vote. Some folks do well, and I still vote, because I've always been a fan of their work. I often vote late. Always manually.
Subscribers often purchase something before they've seen or read it. People purchase music and movies, before they get a chance to judge if it was good or not. That's just part of how the entertainment industry works. Some folks make a purchase simply because they are fans of that performer. To me, auto votes are similar to that. It's quite normal. I do hope they check in to actually consume the content, even though I do realize some folks buy comics and don't even take them out of the packaging. It's not up to me to judge how one wants to consume or support my content in the same way it's not up to banana growers to say there's only one way to enjoy a banana. I know this system here has flaws, and I see where you're coming from. Just know, I'm not offended. I can't really look down on someone though for maximizing rewards, when I know every content producer here wants piles upon piles of Steem next to their work. We're all striving for the same thing.
I just read OCDB went the way of manual curation. Over time, @pharesim, I expect to see more and more folks stepping up to the plate to curate, and with that, more will receive the recognition we both know they deserve. It seems the majority these days want to see balance, an even playing field, and want to push for positive change. It'll take time to get there.
My critique is mostly directed at the bigger stakeholders. I've always wondered how those who already own a significant stake of the platform prefer to grow their personal stake over growing the platform as a whole. There's so much potential here, but most of the people who joined over the years gave up because they didn't manage to grab a foot.
My mission has been spreading since the beginning. Because I own a significant part, and I want to grow the pie for everyone. All I've seen is my share going down, while the value dropped at the same time. My efforts may have helped, but I can't tell, because value has been extracted by others who don't do anything to bring all of us forward.
I see the majority interested in growing the platform too. But that's the majority of users, not the majority of stake unfortunately.
Time will tell. There's no final judgement to be made yet. All I see is that the incentives given by the ruleset don't help, and lessons we learned before have been thrown overboard.
I know about this potential, and know it well. We want the same things. I don't cash out. I watched thousands of hours of work first spike in value, and at that point I could lead by example and show people what was possible here. An easy way to get that mass adoption stuff so many seem to want is to simply have proof of concept sitting there looking everyone in the eye. They want big names here? Well, those big names aren't coming until they see the money. Those were good times and it would have been easy to take this thing to the stars BUT that was precisely the moment charlatans and profiteers took over. They convinced people to buy something that was free! I had to sit and watch thousands more hours worth of work and two years slip by where everything went in reverse. Not only did the value of account drop, but so did the value of my work. I had to sit and watch people sacrifice potential billions the entertainment industry generates yearly, while they attempted to convert the place into some kind of makeshift crypto mining platform so they could earn thousands instead of generate billions.
I've been one of the most frustrated people here for a long time. The only thing I want to see is this whole thing work. I see a lot of folks bragging up how they've invested money but when you've invested nearly your entire life into something, for years, what's worth more?
As I said before, sorry that you're on that list. It could've been anyone else being successful here, but your post was close to payout when I screenshotted, so it showed up on top.
Keep up the good work!
Steem, DO NOT BE SUCCESSFUL. Especially not consistantly
Exactly, #newsteem only in words but not in reality. Everything is the same as it was before. Those so-called curators only upvote posts of the same old big names, which they are sure will get lots of votes and act like they are favoring and changing steem ecosystem. Noone is curating any small fishes, they only reward with downvotes when they find something odd. Again I say it's going nowhere, same old story but a bit different narration I'd say.
it's too obvious nobody is here for onboarding masses, everybody is after profit
Which ones are the so-called curators? 🤔
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While I am sure your curangel project is great, many of us are doing manual curation. Exyle has been pretty open about trading votes. However, his list seems like decent content creators who also curate or are actively engaged in Steem.
I've always respected you, however, like many others you have been disengaged, and it seems odd to come back in swinging just when people are embracing a less ranty version of Steem. #NewSteem.
#oldsteem behavior is to complain about others and cast doubts on the project.
#NewSteem behavior is to use your downvotes and spread enthusiasm.
What are you trying to say with that screenshot? If you look a bit further than the colorful bars, you'll realize that 98% of my stake are inside curangel, doing exactly what you said we should do.
If #newsteem is cheering the circle jerks for you that's your piece of cake. I'd rather point towards the flaws we still haven't addressed, or as in this case even reintroduced.
That you're happy is clear, why should you complain when you're on the upper end of the curve. Look around the minnows and search for enthusiasm with them. Good luck finding more than a handful.
Or maybe you're just as happy as markymark with an old boys club. My goal always was engaging more people, that doesn't work any better with the status quo than with old steem.
Are YOU going to lecture ME... Look that's hysterical. I've been manually curating for 3.5 years.
I finally am winning a little, which I hand back to minnows every day.
You come back from your extended vacation to bitch about what everyone else is doing. That's brilliant.
I think your project will be good. I think you are mad you didn't immediately get a bunch of support, because lot's of people have been manually curating the whole time.
I'm not even in the top 200 earning Authors. (nor do I think I absolutely should be) but my post tend to be in the top ten for engagement every single day.
I've been voting for minnows the entire time. So, for you to complain that I'm getting some votes along with soyrosa and some other good content creators, is just ... ridiculous.
And yes, your stake is probably doing good things and it always has. You are one of the good guys, I just find your rant annoying on several levels.
Have YOU been telling ME to be enthusiastic? I can caps too.
The complaints in my rant didn't target you. I said before, I don't criticize those receiving the autovotes, it's nothing they could influence.
But you have been the one coming here to tell me that everything's fine, and I should shut up. Which just isn't the case. #newsteem brought some good things, and some bad at the same time.
Good for you that you make some more now. And props that you take part in distributing. That's the case with a lot of the autovoted people. My issue are the autovotes though. Giving their votes to smaller accounts who put in similar amounts of work would be the direct way to support the community.
I don't care about the support my project gets. I primarily set it up because I'm too lazy to curate myself, but want my own stake to help the platform grow. I'd very much prefer it to be a backup solution for those not having time to curate themselves than having to handle millions of SP and an even bigger team to use them properly.
And actually, the feedback by smaller accounts has been amazing and more than expected. But I realized now that for most of the bigger stakeholders we just can't offer enough, they still want more, so they shun it. And they still don't understand that growing the community is more important than taking in as much of the inflation as possible for themselves, while putting the "but the persons I vote do support the community then" forward as an excuse.
That I resignated and stopped being active on the platform doesn't mean I've been away. There's just been nothing I could do the last year to improve anything. I'm not a social media person, so I don't post just for the sake of showing that I'm around. I tried with the jukatravels account, but got bored and felt like a farmer pretty quickly.
I invest my heart and mind into working for things I believe in. When I realize that others extract value of my and others work, without contributing anything useful themselves, I get frustrated. Who are you to tell me I can't speak my mind then?
I didn't say you can't... Just be aware you are an influencer. Speak your mind, just know some of us have put a lot of time and energy into turning the mood around on Steem.
You make some great points... I guess I was just hoping those with the power to make change would make change and not spend their energy bringing everyone down. I'll let it go at this point.
I can't imagine being "brought to the floor on day 8.. by one user.
By the way, I also have a solution for those who don't want to curate. They can follow my vote and adsup votes behind me. Everyone knows what they are doing... but do they try to find out how others have been working.
Exyle's over paid and a bit blah, but he's been here every day, making pro steem posts and tweets. While I admit he's farming he also does some good things too.
Sorry, but I just can't agree that shilling is doing good. New people come in, see they don't have a stand against those in the in-circles, and disappear again. One can turn the mood around for a few days (as it happened with mine), but sooner or later reality kicks in. Community building consists of more than bringing new people in, you have to give them reasons to stay around.
Exyle's only been an example because he's written the post Google suggested to me. And there has been a comment under his post, where someone asks if his stats can be achieved with other projects. That made me realize how bad his "openness" is because it creates expectations.
Looking at trending and the current reward distribution, as well the autovotes I get myself, he's just a small part of the general issue.
Have a good day pharesim, I don't want to contribute to this any further. I wish you great success with your project.
You've got DRAMA. You are going to be a Whale!
To view or trade
DRAMAgo to steem-engine.com.You have
DRAMA!To view or trade
DRAMAgo to steem-engine.com.Yes - the 'circle voters' and ROI delegators were never expected to become manual curators I guess. They have had the maximizing on their mind for years now and are just now figuring out how that maximization works under the EIP.
I even suspect that a few of the big SP-holders that are doing manual curation now are going to automate that in a while - and just autovote the authors that they 'discovered' and manually created the most in those first few weeks/months.
I really don't know how we can make 'real curation' more attractive. There's zero content discovery except for 1) going through the depressing New tab on steemit.com, or 2) following feeds from projects like curangel/c-squared/ocd/curie, and 3) the random resteem - but without a 'note section' with our resteems it's hard to explain to your followers why you want them to click on a certain post. (Which is why I personally rarely resteem)
Very effective 'more posts like this' functionality is needed to get people to click on titles of posts before seeing which author wrote that post or even knowing if you follow that author or not.
Also: a tab with 'most commented on' would help out in discovering interesting content that get people to engage, something interesting to browse through but not influenced by high payouts/votes from exclusively high-SP users.
For those reading and willing to curate lesser-known users: the frontpage of steempeak.com has a few tabs like general/science/photography which shows the posts in a nice tiled layout that are curated by actual curation groups like photofeed and c-squared. These are not curation groups with a HUGE monetary impact per say, but they do search for quality content and try to get them more visibility. Browsing through those tabs and dropping a vote here and there especially on names you've never seen before will go a long way <3
Thanks.
2 years ago..
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@tarazkp/ui-resteem-suggestions
Tons of good ideas on the chain by tons of users, but how to make them into a to-do list? Shrugs
auto voter bots to charge customers for the service. Part profit goes back into community. i.e burn / SPS
non compliant auto voters / bots - run them out of town :)
I like the above mentioned 'random optimal curation window' per post that's unreadable by bots :D
I also was a bit taken aback in the boasting of “curating”.. when it’s just autovotes to where they know votes are coming, in fact I started writing a post on what curation is after a discussion on the matter that I haven’t finished yet.
I do believe this will be part of growing pains and I think it’s too early to give up just yet.. things are improving, but yes we have a long way left to go.
Don’t lose hope yet 😉
Still waiting for that post, I wanna know what
lovecuration is.