RE: Open Discussion: Fix Trending & Stop Promotion Abuse
@ats-david You havn't really explained what the disease is and why those forks created a problem.
You said that these protocol changes have stripped away spam protection, spam to me is also a symptom not the disease. Spam is the consequence of a system that penalize its users for moderating it which is what the steem blockchain does.
There needs to be some rewards for downvoting too, for example if a post has more negative weight than positive after 7 days then all the rewards on that post goes 100% to those who voted a negative and the author and those who upvoted get nothing. I don't know how hard and gameable it's going to be to build something like this but it is absolutely necessary for the community to police itself.
Regarding OP, the first question we have to ask is :
Is vote buying advertising or not? We have to come to consensus to what it actually is. If it's advertising then simple UI changes can solve most of it. On a side note I'm also surprised how all existing steem apps display the steem content in the same way which has proved to be one of the worst discoverability experience for users.
To answer the initial question, I see a lot of flaws in the vote buying model for it to be the way advertisers promote on steem in the future. To name a few: advertisement can be downvoted, buying limits ( model doesn't scale ). I could be wrong but in its current form I don't see it being used on a large scale by serious advertisers.
Of course. That was my entire point. The spam, the vote-selling, the shit content being “advertised,” the disengagement, the lack of accountability...this all became a bigger issue after the protocols were changed. They are all symptoms/consequences of last year’s hard forks.
I could explain in detail why/how the hard forks created these problems...which I’ve done many times over since last summer, including before they were implemented. And back then - just like now - nobody listened. But just for good measure, I suppose I’ll detail this again in a separate post. Too long to cover all of the various aspects of it here.
Are you really surprised by this though? Most of our “developers” here are hobbyists or first-timers developing in the social media space. They unfortunately don’t know the fundamentals of social media and user interests...and the users here aren’t typical SM users/content creators either, so both sides skew the metrics. Then we have the actual results of the voting/allocation and displays skewing it even further.
There isn’t even enough of a critical mass of users for real-world advertisers to even consider spending advertising dollars here. Anyone looking at the actual viewing and engagement stats - even for “trending” posts - would quickly look elsewhere to spend their money.
But even if we assume that advertising here actually gained visibility and returned some profit for businesses, it would be more beneficial to them to buy the STEEM once and use it repeatedly for self-voting or self-promotion, not rent space on the trending page for every post they make.
This is the mistake that current users continue to make as well. They pay for temporary advertisement and have nothing to show for it when the advertising period is over. So they’re stuck in this perpetual loop of paying for visibility over and over again when they could simply buy the STEEM outright and get perpetual use out of it.
But this happens in the real world all the time as well. People often rent for the wrong reasons and think that they’re coming out on top financially, but they truly believe that there’s no other way. They continue to do what keeps them poor...so they remain poor, even if it’s just relative to those who are “richer.”
And we have a ton of admittedly real-world poor people here on Steem/Steemit. Does anyone truly wonder why things are the way they are around here?
Wow, you are one of the few witnesses that actually understands a social network. You got my vote
The last point you made is spot on. In the long run users are much better off using those SBD's convert to SP and build their influence. Very few understand this but the steem blockchain rewards very well those who invest in it, compound interest is powerful but users have to be patient, it's not an overnight get rich quick thing.
Same goes for self voting, in the long run this strategy is detrimental. Because users isolate themselves by doing this and will end up being the only ones voting for their post instead of many that they could have supported through their upvotes.
I believe most of the issues on steem are self correcting, some of them also comes from the fact that the user base is still tiny. The moderation one however is critical IMHO. Posts on steem only have likes, they have no dislikes. This is problematic because there is no balance in the system.
I agree. I am very new to this but I want to say I am getting a creepy cult vibe from a lot of the comment sections because there is no hard way to challenge content you dislike. And when I look at what ends up on top I'm like WHAT??!! WHYY
I know what you mean, I'm getting the same vibe..comments on steem are monotonous, most of the discussions are boring and unexciting imo.
If users were incentivized to moderate content, then all the content that provides no value would get downvoted and the quality of interactions would increase greatly.
The constant drama on steem is a direct result of users lacking the tools to moderate this site. Vote buying abuse would be a no issue if downvoting was profitable.
Although... what would stop the power players from buying downvotes and bombing whomever they didnt like into oblivion