RE: People Rank - Using Page Rank Algorithm for Better Curation and Rewards
No, people are voting on "sure shots" because they don't understand the curation rewards.
This post is a great example. 94% of the curation rewards are going to Dan. At the current post value of about $2000, that leaves approximately $30 curation rewards total for everyone else, with the earliest high-SP voters getting most of that. The later voters are getting virtually nothing to literally nothing (I believe many will indeed round down to zero and not be paid at all). If you voted for this post hoping to get curation rewards, you wasted your vote.
While the details may differ, all of the high payout posts are essentially the same. The author and early voters get almost all of the reward; people voting later and who are the ones boosting the rewards to the stratosphere are getting little to no curation rewards in return.
There is often a lot of piling to a relatively small number of posts, I'll agree with that. But the reason is not the curation rewards, it is something else.
Would it not be useful to have two upvoting options? One for rewards and one for "likes"?
There are different desires when I vote on something.
If other users understood better about how they are going to get paid for upvoting they would not pile on and inflate a post that doesn't warrant it. And if they had an option of showing their appreciation at least with a "thumbs up", they could feel like they are showing appreciation. Instead, some users are voting for things they like, but don't necessarily want to reward due to having no other fast option of showing their approval for a post.
If people could thumbs up any post they wanted to, the poster and others could at least have some indication that the post in question had some value and maybe is going in the right direction. Currently when a new user makes a post, I think most other users feel that since it will more likely be a wasted vote because it won't be voted on by a whale, they are reluctant to vote. They may like it, but they won't waste their vote on it.
Anyway, there may be good reasons why separate thumbs up and thumbs down button would be counter-productive or take something away from how the system currently rewards, but I can't think of it.
Any thoughts?
And I liked your comment as well. It was informative and ultimately should help users make better choices.
I have a similar idea how we could evolve the voting. here are my thoughts to it:
We should also think about improving voting:
I would suggest to allow 3 different kind of votes:
Important posts could be valued higher lets say 10x your voting power, but should be more limited then normal up-votes, lets say max 30 in the last 30 days.
This would also solve the problem, that many post get lot of payout, that simply link to a breaking news, like for example the post of the bitfinex hack. With this in place we could just make the post with the braking news more visible without giving an extra money for a post that is done in 10 seconds and would be more like a normal reddit / facebook like.
The same voting we could also do the opposite way:
The above is part of a bigger post where i tried to outline how we could evolve voting and some other current issues:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@arcurus/tagging-and-flagging-hidden-by-a-whale-how-to-evolve-further
Read your article and liked your ideas. Hopefully something similarly interesting is in the works.
Maybe? This raises some complicated issues like what does it mean if someone votes to reward but dislikes. Is this some sort of attack? One of the reasons Steem features posts with higher rewards in terms of visiblity is so people have the opportunity to scrutinize the post and rewards before payout, possibly downvoting if the reward is undeserved or outright abuse (for the same reason, when a post gets votes close to payout time, the time is extended). Perhaps disliking a post would make it less visbile, subverting this protection?
Of course there are many details that would have to be worked out with such an idea. I'm not saying it is a bad idea, just asking questions and thinking it is undeveloped and would need a lot more work to define and analyze before seriously considering it.
Here an suggestion to evolve the post visibility, what wecould do about the voting i posted bellow in the comment:
Fair visibility for all posts
Currently posts are not only rewarded exponentially, but also they get a lot more votes if they become visible on the trending page. So even with linear vote-counting, they are rewarded exponentially, because they attract more voters through being visible.
It would be much more fair if the posts which are displayed on the main site as default are drawn in a lottery like style. Every time you reload the page the displayed posts on the top site could be drawn through a lottery. The more votes they have already the higher the chance to be selected. This would give all participants a fair chance to be listed at the top and therefore attract more votes.
@arcurus I like that idea! It would prominently display some posts that haven't received a lot of voting interest yet, but might if featured. Good thinking.
@arcurus I also agree.
I think the scrutiny of high-value posts to identify subjectively undeserved rewards is an important part of curation that is very hard to get right and people fortunately/unfortunately have been erring on the side of caution.
I agree, vote should reward. If you don't feel it is worth the vote, you can comment. It promotes the posts visibility still and helps in a back end way. Flagging should have a tiered options as to reason (all with same penalty) but clarity as to why it was downvoted. Also, what would you think of whales using algo to designate small small amounts f voting power based on historical upvotes lining up with point of views per whale? I am sure there's logistics I have not realized or thought through as yet on that... but it's a thought
Agreed needs fleshing out and seeing what are the potential pitfalls.
I can see that being a viable option actually. There are posts that you can disagree with vehemently, but still feel that the person deserves a reward because their opinion can be just as valid as yours, but you don't agree with it. So you reward them for the effort and opinion while at the same time let them know that you don't automatically agree with it, JUST because you rewarded it.
I may be in the minority on feeling this way, but I've seen quite a few posts that I think should be rewarded, but I don't think they are my cup of tea and want to still give them support. Like there is some user, whose name I can't recall, that has some rather creative opinions and posts. They make me cringe at times, because it's not something that I like, but I think that others should be exposed to this users meanderings, so I would like to reward, and thumbs down. Considering the thumbs down is only an indicator of ones approval and doesn't need to affect visibility, I'm not sure how it can be gamed or thought of as an attack. If it were to affect visibility then there might be a problem. Hrmm, just thought of something else, but this comment is already too long.
I'll see if I can find more posts talking about the voting system and try to find an elegant and simple solution. Though, I really hate to be spending our time discussing something that isn't listened to by the devs or that is already being worked on by them. I'm not the guy out there that loves to talk about what player should be drafted as if they were a GM of a team. If we have no say, then we might as well go on our way.
Thanks for being out here in the wild so much sharing your ideas, Smooth. It's appreciated.
Its a good point and its interesting to follow the development of these tools. I would suggest that there are two separate ways of appreciation - a "vote" = Like and another "upvote" that is as present "Like+reward" - The flagg option likewize split in "Dislike" and "Downvote". This will allow for more detailed feedback from readers and followers. And again - the collection of power to whales is a really counter productive idea.
Since your idea is basically my idea, I approve, but
This isn't entirely the problem. Perhaps the weighting is too heavy, but I'm under the impression that an alteration to their vote power is in the works such that they can choose to give heavier or lighter weighting to their votes. We shall see. Sooner rather than later, I hope.
People not understanding the curation rewards is a very simple UI problem. It would be trivial to add an indicator by the upvote button that gives you information about what sort of reward might be possible for your vote. "Percentage of curation rewards remaining" or something like that. This would help people understand how curation rewards work. Their confusion is understandable for two reasons:
Agreed. It would seem that the devs have a habit of thinking everyone understands this system as well as they do. That isn't a slam, I think it is valid criticism and something that all of us are guilty of. Doctors are notorious for using jargon and talking over the heads of patients and this is something I know from first hand experience and takes constant concerted effort to improve.
Anyway, you make good points. We are in beta and I can only assume that the UI will get a dedicated team to deal with making it more new user friendly. If we are to get many new users here, and keep them, this will surely need to be addressed.
Lol, I can see you are not an experienced developer. No offense. But that would lead to all sorts of misunderstandings.
Haha, it's true - I'm not a developer.
But the opacity of the current interface is already leading to all sorts of misunderstandings. It's also leading to people "wasting" their votes on trending articles. I don't know, maybe that's the point.
What are the misunderstandings that would be so egregious?
@biophil, I am very very sleepy so this reply may not be so great. In short, the masses won't ever understand it, the cognitive load is too high. K.I.S.S.
People want to know that someone took the time to see their post. A simple view counter will let people know there was interest without giving a reward.
Yep, this is yet another thing that I've mentioned would be helpful for all users.
If 100 people see a post and 100 people upvote it, versus 10,000 seeing it and 100 people upvote it, that can tell you a lot.
Is there any downside of everyone being able to see how many "views" a post has? Can this then be gamed? Are views even saved in to the blockchain? I assume it's Steemit.com only.
Anyway, I can only imagine how much better the site will be a year from now with all the user input that we have at our disposal. Keep it up!
People like to show approval. There should be a LIKE flag and count as well as a vote flag and count. Steemers need to be educated further to understand the voting mechanism and reward but provided with the means to express approval. Both voting and approval could feed into the reputation algo. This may help to stem swarm voting, but does nothing to improve the rate and breadth of steem power distribution. The whales/dolphins need to gift/seed some stake rather than lend it....though how you accomplish that in a fair way, I don't know.
People upvote what they think is important. Most people are not often optimizing their curation rewards, including myself.
Our discussion of curation rewards is most for identifying vulnerabilities that can be gamed.
Nevertheless the curation reward incentive (or the misunderstanding of it) is apparently driving the initial stage of the groupthink where those who do try to optimize their curation rewards and frontrun whales try to get in early on voting for blog posts. Then this boosts visibility and thus boosting votes (helping to get the crucial whale attention thus somewhat self-fulfilling) from those who vote on what they think is important.
Also I think much of the groupthink has to do with an inherent groupthink in interests of those who are on the site and have significant voting power. Most of us are coming from affiliation with Bitcoin or in the same household with someone who was into Bitcoin.
I think we need actual surveys of users as to why they vote on things. To be honest, I can only use anecdotes and I think everyone else is pretty much doing the same.
The dollarvigilante "joke" post is a prime example. 800 or so upvotes isn't because they thought it was a valuable post. It wasn't that funny, it wasn't that informative. It would be nice to know what so many thought was worthy of upvotes. Were some upvoting in protest of the downvotes? Fanboism? We are all guessing on these matters.
Anyway, thanks for your comments. I've seen you around for awhile and enjoy your input.
That but I think more that the way he responded with some degree of willingness to change and also how he better explained his background and admitted some of his mistakes. There was some (modicum of) humility. Thus he gamed some sympathy vote for the @berniesanders downvote. Community likes to see progress. That was likely considered important progress and upbeat.
But what if I just want to give you a reward without expecting anything in return?
@smooth thanks for taking the time to reply..
I agree, people wrongly think they can get worthwhile curation rewards from late votes on big posts. But I stand by my assertion that people are betting rather than voting ("genuine content mining")..
I've written more about it here..