RE: A case for eliminating curation rewards
Curation is a valuable service
How is curation a valuable service? Valuable to whom?
To me the concept of curating is flawed because it forces people to vote for stuff they are not interested in. It goes against the natural will of people. As more and more content gets published on the steem blockchain the less sense it will make to curate, why would you upvote family pics from people you never heard of? People are going to form their own little communities and upvote within that community, curating content on the whole blockchain makes no sense.
These are obviously false even today. Curators stands to earn far more from voting on new authors who don't get much votes. Or whichever post has the least vote competition from bots etc. In fact, some have started spreading their votes through comments as they are mostly all unvoted.
There is a nuance between spread and diversify. What you refer to is diversification. I am talking about the weight guilds put on posts, they never vote under 100%. They put all the weight on the posts that they vote to pocket max curation rewards.
Curation is valuable to the whole platform.
//Edit: to be clear, I'm not talking about the "curation" happening now on Steem, but the natural curation behavior.
Image a new user come to this website to look for popular contents. She'll see the trending page. The posts are there because the curators (voters) have done their work.
Image a Q/A post which have thousands of replies. It's the curators that brought the most valuable replies to the top, so saves later readers' time.
It's not the concept of curating that is flawed, it's the curation reward distribution mechanism that is flawed. A bad-designed incentive mechanism brings bad results. IMHO it's better to make the incentives aligned, but not eliminate them. I strongly suggest you to read my post and the discussions there: https://steemit.com/curation/@abit/benefits-of-pure-linear-reward-distribution .
Good content naturally rises to the top, there is no need to incentivizes people to vote.
Also currently it is not 'good content' that rises to the top , it is 'content that will earn the most money'. The platform don't really reflects what most people want.
It's a valuable service to the community, as many have stated before. Again, that's a function of the current system rather than the concept of curation rewards itself. You are right that in July 2016 the curation landscape was really messed up, and only 20-30 authors were being upvoted regularly. The bots were all swarming to these authors, while the rest of the community went unrewarded.
However, things have changed dramatically since. With the emergence of curation guilds that focused sincerely on quality and seeking out new authors, bots have had to adapt and use clever algorithms to determine quality and vote on posts by new authors. Indeed, this has also encouraged manual curators to vote on good posts they like, because they know a curation guild or whale would be looking out for these posts.
Today, the curation community is so efficient that it is almost impossible for a new author creating good content to go unnoticed for long. This is because the curation rewards allow incentive for intensive curation. Several curators spend several hours every single day trying to find the best quality posts and they'll stop doing so and switch to casual mode without an incentive. Casual mode is where votes keep on piling on the same authors over and over again, with no one bothering to dig to the depths to find great content that was lost.
Without these curators, Steemit would be the wasteland it was in July/Aug 2016. Thousands of users left ignored with zero exposure. Today, while influx of users hasn't happened, many of them have been at least discovered and given a shot at being retained.
I will agree though that with the Communities feature incoming, curation rewards may not be required for voting and could be restructured to actual curation, Communities moderators etc.
This is also demonstrably false. Steem Trail does vote with most posts at 100%, but Curie's average strength has always been about 40%-70%, while Steem Guild was about 25% for many months. Steem Guild has since changed their focus, but your claim of "they never vote under 100%" isn't true at all. That said, the top independent curators blocktrades and abit do vote 100%.
I agree with a lot of things you said , you made a good analysis of the situation.
However to me this is the wrong strategy for mainstream adoption, because it only attracts money opportunists who have no interest in developing their friends/family circle on steemit. They come here with only one purpose which is to make money. This is why steemit is not growing because people see steemit as a site to make money, a bit like gambling, they don't see it as a social media site.
You said
This is good actually. If a new users doesn't get any reward it is a good sign, however when a newbie receives 20 votes at the same time from random stranger the system looks fake af
In any social media site new users have to build their audience, they have to build their communities, their friend,family circle in order to get upvotes. Here on steemit they don't need any of this, it is just a lottery, you post something, sometimes you win sometimes you don't but there is no incentives to build your community.
If curation rewards are eliminated it would allow for natural growth, active users would have more power and people who post here will have to engage more to get upvotes, they will have to bring their family/friends over in order to get upvotes from them, and since users will have more influence it will encourage everyone to buy steem.
If steemit want real growth influence will have to be made available to active users so that these users can build their little communities and grow from there. This is the only way you are going to scale to millions of users and make steemit attractive to the average person.
This site assumes that people want to share stuff with strangers,etc..some people don't want to be part of the whole thing they just want to be with their friends and upvote each other's content. To me this is the only logical way to scale, because it is a natural way, whether their is money or not involved that's how people use social media site.
I feel everything you are looking for is actually achieved by the incentive of curation rewards. I agree with most of it, and I'm confident that curation rewards go some way in achieving our common goal.
The big elephant in the room is the complete lack of concerted marketing and outreach programs to actually bring in new users. Indeed, curation rewards are a novel idea that may encourage millions of users to sign up.
Let's see how the system functions at a representative scale - millions of users. Again, like I said, with the Communities feature coming in the end of the year, we can think of eliminating voting rewards for more direct curation/moderation rewards.
Till then, we'll have to agree to disagree about the impact of curation rewards. :)
Curation rewards encourages people to vote for post outside of their circle/communities, they achieves the opposite of what I am looking for.
Most of the voting is done by people without an incentive because they get near to zero rewards for it anyway. Many people pick up good authors and resteem them to give them exposure, without a financial benefit.
I think people vote because they like the content, and they will continue doing so without financial incentives. Perhaps the ones that vote for incentives/rewards can be missed.
There are very few independent voters with big wallets, I wonder what somebody like @blocktrades would do if there were no curation rewards. Maybe he and his better half would merrily curate along, in the interest of the platform and the price of Steemit.
[Nesting]
But why not reward the people who have done their work well (assume it has really been done well)? With a "right" reward people will feel even better, so more engagement.
To be clear, I'm not saying trending in current system is natural. But current design is not good doesn't mean changing it to anything else is good.
It seems some people's thinking is stuck in an economic model despite its not working, and that could well stifle any discussion aimed at improving things, leading to ineffective, polarised debate only.
When a model doesn't predict what actually happens, or enable what you want, you change it. You can go to a linear curve, you can abolish curation rewards, etc. Both are better options than continuing with what we are doing. I'm in favour of a linear curve now, but if it turns out it doesn't help, I'll start opposing the idea in stead of blaming reality for not cooperating.
I would then be even more in favour of abolishing curation rewards, mainly because I have other ideas about what makes people invest, what motivates people to curate, and what damage bots and reward hunters are doing.
I will freely admit I am stuck in another economic theory for now, one that takes a more anthropological approach and includes non-financial motivation, group dynamics, and fun. I may well be proven wrong also.
Because there is no standard to tell what 'well' is , 'well' is subjective, some people might think well is this and other may think well is another thing, there is no way to define 'well'.
I don't want to change it, i want to eliminate it :)
Maybe in the future we could find a much better curation rewards system but meanwhile it is doing a lot damage and is undermining the credibility of steem.
This is why we have voting. We're trying to define "well" by "quantity of people/SP upvoted minus downvoted". If you disagree with this definition, then we have no base to discuss.
It's still a change.
By the way I just found that you replied to my post earlier, so it's my fault to link it here for several times, sorry.
This is the problem 'well' in the platform is currently defined by being 'content that pay the most.' not ' content that people like the most'
[Nesting]
Sounds like you want to get rid of stake based voting. That's interesting. Ask Dan?
IMHO without stake based voting Steem is no difference than reddit or other sites.
I don't want to get rid of stake based voting. It's the whole point of buying steem, to have more influence than others.
I want a system that do not use money to change people's voting behavior , I want a natural system where people upvote for stuff they like.
[Nesting]
Yes, with stake based voting, naturally you'll have some person has more influence than others. Then naturally you'll have 'content that pay the most' as the 'content that people like the most'. You can't have your cake and eat it. What do you really want indeed?
Use money to encourage people to vote for better content is not evil. BTW "better" is defined above.
I'll say it again: this can be done with a linear rewarding mechanism.
It is extremely valuable to users and to the platform itself. Any site with a large amount of content would be a complete jumble of unusable nonsense if there weren't some form of curation. Most successful (centralized) sites explicitly use a combination of human and algorithmic curation, or algorithmic with some degree of user input. They spend a lot of money developing maintaining and operating these systems. BTW, another word for algorithmic curation in the context of a decentralized system is bot voting.
Reddit has a large amount of content and it's clean. The upvotes/downvote system works well.
A site would be messy only if more people where upvoting trash than good content, also like I said many times in this thread 'complete jumble of unusable nonsense' is subjective if it s stuff that people have upvoted then its content that they want to see and if they havn;t upvoted it then it will be ignored and left in a little corner.
Yes reddit does, and curation is extremely valuable on reddit too (which was the question you asked). It isn't incentivized on reddit but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be. Again, many other people have pointed out to you that reddit doesn't pay for posts either, and has plenty of those. The argument is sound that just because other sites don't pay for X and get X does not mean that X shouldn't be paid for.
And BTW, reddit doesn't rank solely based on votes either. Votes are fed into a secret algorithm that produces a score which is displayed and used for ranking. As I mentioned elsewhere, the analogous concept of an algorithm used for ranking on a centralized system is vote bots that provide algorithmic input to ranking a decentralized system.
The reason it is valuable it is because it isn't incentivized. People are voting with their hearts not their greedy minds. If you were to create a curation rewards system on reddit you would have the exact same problem that steemit has and the site would turn into shit.
I don't know why people keep repeating this, how is this relevant to the discussion of eliminating curation rewards? My argument for removing curation rewards has never been that people will still vote even without rewards. This was just a response to someone who said nobody would vote if curation rewards are eliminated. All the reasons for removing these rewards are in OP.
[nesting]
I would argue the same about posting. A lot of posting on Steemit is just doing what "greedy minds" think will earn rewards (often correctly), and not what they enjoy posting.
Because ultimately a lot of the same reasons apply. Most people participate in social media for enjoyment and social interaction. Even a lot of blogging is basically done for enjoyment outside of a few professionals who already monetize one way or another. The idea that non-professional social interaction in the form of posting is going to be paid introduces many of the exact same distortions that you claim occur with voting (i.e. decisions made by greedy minds rather than hearts), with the main difference being that even if you are the #1 best poster on the site (unlikely being the best curator) you have no incentive to buy or hold STEEM/SP because it doesn't help your earnings.
With greedy mind but writing a rewardable post is much more harder and requires significantly more costs than click upvote button or enter your posting key and rules into voting trails.
I want to tell here the newbie point of view: If humans and/or bots vote without even looking at the content then what does this upvote say about the content ? What does it do? a) unsharpen the cristallization of real good valuable content because nobody looked at it and it was more a question of united voteshifting,trail&whale strategies and not about the quality of the content. b) If i don´t look into the story how can i tell if it is worth gaining reputation ?? I know cruelsome newbie questions but how does a bot/algorhythm define if it is worth gaining repution or being upvoted ??? I thought in the beginning curators are persons watching the content and checkmarking it as usefull. So i did a lot of reseach last 72 h but still I dont understand some
mechanism like STEEMvoter. If i sign up there steemvoter votes for me and as it says in the rules 1 Vote every day steemvoter will use itself to promote$$ itself. this end up in massive downpowering and wealth export as i saw in the steemvoter history. I do not understand the genius advantage behind this but I´m open to learn more. I expressed my fears in the following grafics. Thank you for the attention