RE: How To Fix Steemit For Communities & Viral Engagement
I think this is prone to sybil attacks since it probably won't be hard to create fake followings and game the verification. Ultimately Steem Power should be the foundation for voting and delegation of power should spread outwards from there.
I do like that you use followers as a parameter for delegation. I proposed a simple approach to delegate voting power to follower lists. This is natural because anyone you follow indicates: 1) the person is verified 2) produces content you're interested in 3) produces content you think others are interested in so you can make money on curation. All three reasons validate why those that are followed should have more influence.
The allocation could just be spread evenly among those you follow, so if a whale follows 50, voting power is split among 50 people. If a whale follows 1000, voting power will be split among 1000.
The other reason why this is good is because from a UI/UX perspective you don't want users to spend time creating their own delegation lists. It's easier to click the 'follow' button over time without much thought.
What do you guys think?
I would be somewhat careful about possible motives of following someone. It could be just to increase "social relations" or a way to indirectly flatter the followed so as to "reciprocate" the following. You can follow 5000 people in the hope that even if 1/10 of them check their followings and reciprocate, you get 500 followers back.
Well it's based on stake so if the Steem Power holders want to follow those using the followback strategy it's their choice. I think over time most people will avoid people who are using the followback strategy because there is actual value in who they delegate to unlike Twitter. The fewer people you follow the more control you have over where you're directing power.
I was just trying to make it easy and combine the follower/curation list, but if people feel strongly they want to keep it separate it would just be a matter of creating a separate list of delegates. I just think it's easier from a UI/UX perspective to combine it and for the most part the follower & curation list would probably be largely the same.
The uniqueness aspect I proposed defeats this.
But following is not a "state". It's in flux. I click the button now and I'm following you and then click it and unfollow you. And then click it again and I'm following you.
So in the scenario above, I get 500 reciprocal followers and then unfollow the other 4500 which didn't follow me back... lol?
No problem. All this just get muted by the fact that everyone that follows everyone are no longer unique follows and thus deweighted relatively.
Could you be more specific? How can they game the verification? The community is pretty diligent about fairness.
Delegation is still a top-down control decided by whales. It isn't spontaneous formulation of new communities in a decentralized manner which I posit is necessary for viral growth.
It seems to me that offering some extra voting power towards motivating uniqueness of followed groupings, provides a balance between disconnected groupings and one-size-fits-all.