My etiquette rules for authoring at Steem
A highly successful crypto currency hinges on the fact that all participants will be economically aligned to do what is best for value and utility growth. We're not quite there with Steem unfortunately. While it's definitively possible to tune the ruleset, I think it is pretty much impossible to get to the point where people won't be trying to game the system. To avoid the "tragedy of the commons", we need etiquette guidelines, and there should be room to politely hint people in the right direction when we believe they break those guidelines.
I'm holding a fair amount of steem power - much less than the 30k-60k that @tarazkp thinks is ideal, but still - the award pool I control is significant enough. Or, at least, it was significant enough when I started writing this article some months ago. With great power comes great responsibility ... and even modest power should be treated with at least modest responsibility, hence I thought I should formalize some of the self-invented etiquette rules I'm trying to follow. I haven't always been following them. This is the first time I try to nail them down in writing. Does there already exist any guidelines written by others?
I've earlier been doing some self-upvoting, and I have some arguments in my hat for this practice. However, seeing a growing community scoffing at self-voting, I've more or less stopped with this practice.
My four-year old daughter, she hasn't learned to read yet, but anyway she came to see my work - and she commented that it was far too long. She has a point, so I'll split this up in several posts. This post will be about my authoring rules.
Image source: Wikimedia Commons
Rules for my own postings
Two conditions must be met for me to come up with a post: I must have the time for it and I must have something to say. I have tried to post when I didn't really have the time for it, and I'm embarrassed of the results, it's needed to spend some efforts to get quality. I think there are too many here feeling they need to keep up a certain posting volume, posting things even though they neither have something to say. I think it's better to post infrequently and erratically rather than to post things of low quality.
In general I'm writing two kind of posts; one is the personal updates on my life, facebook-style, "this is where I've been, this is what I've been doing, this is what I've been eating", etc, those will always be tagged with #blog. The other is more general and less personal, content that I consider to be of general interests, which will be posted without the #blog tag. Of course, there may be grey zones, like sometimes I may try to focus more on presenting noteworthy attractions rather rather than blogging on "where I've been and what I've been doing", sometimes I experience things that I deem to be crazy enough that it may be of general interest, howto-guides, etc.
Whenever a post can be geographically pinned, I try to geotag it according to the @steemitworldmap standards.
I've installed the steepshot application, but haven't tried it out yet, and I probably never will, making a post consisting of only one photo is not my style. It may seem more profitable to post lots of small posts instead of one large post (particularly if resorting to self-voting), but it feels spammy. I'd like to sieve through the photos I take on my laptop, pick out the best ones and post those.
I will never self-vote personal blog posts, but if I believe I've written an article that I believe is of general interest, well-written and important, I will consider it.
I do try to use a mix of photos/images and text in my posts.
Quotes from other sources are clearly marked as quotes, and I will inform on the source.
I try to only use images with free licenses, and I will give credits and link to the image sources.
I try not to make too long posts, then it's better to split them into several posts
I will try to always read through a post once more before posting it. Is it coherent? Is it understandable? Are there typos? Should I try to split it into more sections?
I will always link to any sources and references
In particular, I will link in relevant wikipedia articles
I realize I'm not a very good author, and I will never become bitter that my posts didn't receive as many votes as I feel it "deserved".
I try to put some thoughts into the category tags and I try to avoid "squatting", the tags should be relevant to the post.
Rules for my own comments
I believe the comments field is to be used, I believe it's a good place for debating and argument, and I do like a good debate and argument. Getting involved in the comments may be economically good, by becoming a part of the community. Hence I have those rules in place:
I write comments as often as I can, but I never write a comment just to write a comment. If I don't have anything to contribute but "nice post!", I should probably just skip it.
I'm always trying to be polite, I believe it's a good think to be polite, and in an environment like Steem it may also be economically favorable.
Another thing that may be economically favorable is to always pretend to agree with everyone, and never get involved in a good argument just because one is afraid of losing downvotes or getting flagged. This causes sort of a chilling effect and that's very bad. While I may shy away from a good argument for many reasons, I shall never let "fear of economical sanctions" be a significant part of that.
It's easy to digress, but some people may not like off-topic discussions on "their" posts, so I try to avoid that.
Never avoid a good argument, but always try to avoid logical fallacies, in particularly avoiding ad-hominems.
Do you have any thoughts? Does those rules make sense or not? Do you practice some similar etiquette rules? Do you have more rules that should be added?
I think your rules do make sense. I agree that if we're posting or commenting we should have something meaningful to say. Doing either for the sake of just getting things out there is probably not the best tactic. If it goes on very long, people tend to tune it out.
I'm actually glad to see most people are polite in their writing on Steemit. The ones that aren't stand out like a sore thumb. I can't say I've found myself in the middle of an argument yet, but there are ways of going about a conversation that can keep it from getting out of hand.
I agree, though, we should never be fearful of being flagged for what we believe to be true. In some cases, though, it's just best to walk away.
I've found myself having off topic conversations more than I care to admit, but usually it's with the individual who wrote the post, but otherwise, I agree, we should respect the thoughts of the author and stay on topic.
I always read through every post and comment I make at least once, but I come from a newspaper background and so editing is one of those things I just do. It's amazing how words I did not type or misspell show up. :) I'm sure it wasn't me! Unfortunately, there's no one else to blame it on.
There are two extremes: at one hand the very heated and aggressive arguments. Tears are shed, ad-hominems are frequently used, sometimes it goes as far as death threats and physical violence. That's like the Internet I grew up with. The other extreme is the echo-chamber effect where people with different points of view simply does not interact with each other, and where those that do interact with each other always agree and support each other - and if someone comes with any criticism, they are moderated away, downvoted or flagged into obscurity. The latter is a growing trend; we're seeking out similar-minded people on the Internet, it's often more comfortable to just walk away if we see something we disagree strongly with, and the social networks are to some degree encouraging this trend. With Steemit, there is even an economical intensive to agree with everyone.
Both those extremes are very bad, ideally we should find some middle ground. Friendly arguments where one exchange viewpoints and arguments in a rational and polite manner is both good and needed, hence I think it's important to reach out and tell when disagreeing with things, rather than to simply ignore it and walk away.
I agree with a lot of your points.
Regarding self-voting, I think a certain extent is ok. Of course 0% is ideal, but below 5% is (for me) completely acceptable. Up to 10-15% is ok-ish, and above I see a problem. But it also depends a lot on when the self-vote is triggered (by doing it in the first 30 min you "steal" more rewards from other curators).
For commenting, I sometimes just want to let the author know that I appreciate his work, without adding any content to a diskussion. In that case, I try to write more than just "good post" by writing 1-2 sentences that relate to his content.
I read something similar in a recent??? @steemitblog ??? post talking about changes coming up in the next hard fork. I'm having a bit of trouble understanding the statement.
The problem I'm having wrapping my head around is the idea that first you create something out of thin air (a post you created using your brain), without which there would be nothing to curate. Shouldn't you have the advantage when it comes to curation?
Yes, you are getting 75% as the author. Authors do not get curation rewards for self-voting, but if you vote in the first 30 min, a proportion of the curation rewards is changed to author rewards. Thus, the curators get less than their 25%.
No self-voting would be fairest, yes. But it's easy to game, people would just create a secondary account, delegate all their steam power there and self-vote.
aha! I didn't realize it got switched to author rewards.
off subject... toxicology, huh? As in the movie Outbreak?
Well no, this was a virus, if I recall it correctly.
Toxicology as the science of toxins, i.e. harmful chemicals. I work as a scientist, mainly on assessing the risk of food contaminants.
I don't see any problem in self upvoting. I see it as a problem for the "community" when one only upvotes his posts.
Regarding spamming I also thought of some of my posts with steepshot being spammy and probably they are. "Luckily" I uninstalled the app because it has too many errors so I don't have too many posts of the kind. Sometimes though it is really one picture that I want to share and a title letting people that see it give a meaning of it through comments and start some interaction, but I am aware the general feeling about such posts is of spam.
Regarding re-reading of the post and linking of the sources I do that almost always. Almost...
On the comment topics I admit that I would say some spicy words to some of the "good posts" from the trending page, but I don't wan't to enter the flag and dispute zone. I consider that the Steem platform should do something about this. After all the trending page is somehow the platforms image.
Finally, even if my vote is only 0.01 I really think twice before giving it. I upvoted low quality posts because I saw the effort. Even if the English was bad and the post far from professional that guy/gal put some effort in it and I appreciated the effort and why not believe in evolution of everything.
I don't like long posts and don't read them either. It's a blog after all not a degree thesis. Something between 2-5 minutes of read, depending on the topic, should be more than enough in my opinion.
We all have our own ideas about what is the correct thing to do as far as posts, voting etc.., none are right and all are right depending on your own perspective. You have inspired me to write something similar though, thanks.
First of all, I would like to talk about self voting. I acknowledge that I am one of them who votes for their own content or comments. Although I am trying to minimize my self voting and encouraging good contents by my limited voting power. But why this is happening, I mean self voting? People are investing something and getting no reward after writting some good articles. I have so many good friends who started with enthusiasm and wrote some good contents. But after some period, without getting any reward or appreciation they ended up with leaving steemit. I think this lacking lead to self voting. The community need to thing this seriously. However, very good, informative and enriched article. Thanks a lot for your contribution and help to learn something from your content.
I'm intending to follow up on voting and self-voting in a future post, I appreciate the input on this.
Thanks. Waiting for the future post :)
Pretty much agree with the points made.
The caveat on Steemit as in the "real" world...
and everything you don't do
has consequences...