Do we need Steemit Posting Limits?
Should we be limited to how many posts we can make based upon our Steem Power? Here I discuss the theory.
So I was watching my buddy @craig-grant 's video ( View Here ) a few minutes ago and he mentioned the thought that users with lower steem power should be limited to how much they can post. The reason being, since Steemit has gained popularity these past 2 weeks there has been a huge influx in posts from smaller "minnow" accounts. A lot of which are spamming and abusing this current no limit system. My guess on the reasoning of this would simply be, minnows are small earners and don't earn much when they post, and to get the most money they feel they need to post a lot to be seen. In reality they are better off spending a day writing a great blog post on a topic that they enjoy and their chances of earning will increase. Taken into consideration that they also comment a lot throughout the day. Here is a screenshot of Steemit's posts increase over the past week:
The Idea
Users with more Steem Power will be allowed more posts in smaller time periods than users with lower steem power.
Minnows will be allowed 1-2 posts a day, increasing slightly for users with higher SP thresholds. Ex: Below 500 SP 1-2 post per day, 5,000 SP 3-4 post per day, 10,000 SP 5-8 post per day and so on. This may seem unfair from a smaller accounts point of view but some type of limit must be put in place for quality control. Larger accounts have proven themselves as good bloggers and their posts enhance the platforms feed. Smaller "newbie" accounts tend to sometimes spam and also tend to try and gain their SD and SP by posting multiple posts within the hour. There are low SP accounts that posts great content, but you only need one piece of good content to be seen by bigger accounts. Being that smaller accounts must post a very good blog post to earn a good amount it will cause them to try to post better content.
The Pros
More curating and commenting.
I've said this before, new users on Steemit have a better chance of earning through voting and leaving comments. With an algorithm keeping low SP accounts posting less, users will be forced to interact and feed off of higher earning users. Good content will be easy to find and ultimately there will be more minnows making money because of their commenting and voting. People will also take their time with creating content and will be forced to make their limits count. Spam will drop off nearly 97% because users have to think and make it worth their post. No spam means a cleaner feed and a higher quality site which will ultimately encourage more users to compete to create better content.
The Cons
Whale and dolphin spam and abuse.
Just because an account has a lot of SP, it doesn't mean the account is a good blogger, or even a good person. One flaw that I see with this idea is that power could be given to the wrong people in a sense. Larger steemed accounts may see this as an opportunity to spam and abuse this new system. They can post more and being that they have higher SP and higher limits set in place for posting, they may spam and turn the site into a dolphin and whale show. Where meme's and quotes are earning thousands, while smaller accounts are stuck having to put together huge blog post masterpieces just for a shot at making a decent amount of money from it. The average human isn't a writer or blogger so this idea would turn off a lot of newcomers to Steemit within their first few days. They would see what it would take to earn big and realize that they missed the train to become a big earner and quickly give up on the site.
My Solution
No Bias.
The best way to combat the cons of this theory would be to simply make the limits for posting onto Steemit for EVERY account low. There shouldn't be any bias. All accounts should be limited to no more than 5 posts per day to keep spam low. Ideally 3-4 posts. This will keep spam low and the quality of most post will rise. With these limits ALL users will be forced to think out their blog posts before posting. 3-4 posts per day allows for one post in the morning, one around the afternoon, one around the evening and one before bed if the limit is set at 4 which from that angle actually seems like a lot of posts. Creating the bias for larger accounts could be a good idea for curating content but overall people want their own posts to make money and not depend on their curation rewards to get them started. What are your thoughts? Leave a comment below.
Instead of basing the amount of posts per day on steem power it could also be based on the average amount of upvotes per post.
nice, more upvotes on previous posts = higher posting limits
I posted 20 times yesterday and they all got upvotes and comments, so I don't want posting limits for myself, but those who don't get upvotes and comments should have limits. so limits based on user interaction instead of SP is much better, and maintains the free economy aspect
This idea is a bit more reasonable but suppose we implement something like this? Could it be restricted on a per client basis where Steemit is considered a client of Steem, but Steemchat or other technologies built on Steem do not have to abide by these rules? I think the issue I have mainly is we cannot implement this as a Steem wide rule. I think for Steemit specifically it is worth discussing at least but for Steem, there is no way I can think of to do it in a way where you don't get unintended consequences.
Even doing it for Steemit could produce unintended consequences. For example what if it slows the growth and diversity of Steem in the long term. Expert and established posters would benefit and this is fine because we have more Steem Power, and it's true most of us probably don't post more than 4 posts a day, but things might be different a year from now with over a million users, and more quality content than anyone knows what to do with.
Take Reddit for example, on Reddit you have no limit that I've seen. People seem to post as much as they want. If there is to be a limit I would say it could cause people to think subconsciously something like; "I can post on Reddit and they aren't making me buy anything or setting limits, and I'm not making any money here so why don't I just keep posting on Reddit?". And it gives Reddit the opportunity to highlight the fact that they don't have any limits, it gives them an edge that they wouldn't ordinarily have.
Reddit is known not to have only quality content. What they seem to do is organize the content very well so that we don't see all the troll posts, spam, and trash. I think that might be a better way to handle it so that there isn't any perceived barrier to entry for the little guy. Logically your idea makes sense but the psychology of it is dangerous because we don't know how the little posters might take it. How would I have taken it if I were a little poster and I feel as if the system is limiting me?
I think steemit the way it is now is much better than reddit, so comparison to reddit does not jive well for me. If I am a little poster and I am limited to 1 post per hour until my posts start getting more upvotes and comments, I would think that to be very reasonable, but since upvotes and comments can be faked, then steem power is the better way to go
I always thinks the quality of your blog will determine your actual worth and in a bunch of peoples you will be upvoted by your brilliance...!
The challenge with posting limits based on number of votes or number of replies is that both can be faked by sybil attacks.
Rate limiting based upon total steem power sounds good. We already have bandwidth rate limiting. We will be reducing the target block size with the upcoming hardfork which should cause bandwidth rate limiting to impact more small spammers.
sounds good, when I watched a video with dan and ned on blocktalk, they talked about steem power being the way to limit the amount of transactions a person can perform because there are no transaction fees, so posting may not be considered a transaction right now, but it could fall into that category.
You may be right, but I've seen some whales that aren't very good bloggers and some minnows that can write their butts off. I don't believe so much in limiting posts to a max per day, but quality of posts is something that should be compensated and spammy or low-quality posts should be limited. So my take from all of this is: maybe a post should be published only AFTER it has been upvoted by at least 3 random minnows or 1 whale. Steemit could choose randomly a predetermined amount of members and show them incoming posts. Once a post receives three "minnow" votes or one "whale" vote, it graduates to "new". I really believe that would get rid of spam and low-quality posts for good. Replies, however, should remain unlimited.
Yes, I think it necessary! It is necessary to make a posting fee at least 0.10 STEEM for the post. That would solve the problem of spam.
A fee would discourage new people from interacting with Steemit. Posting has to be free because Steem is more than just Steemit. Steemit is only the first iteration of Steem. So how would this global rule effect all of Steem and all iterations of Steem? It would reduce the ability to post on stuff which is unrelated to Steemit?
Hmm that's a good idea too
I thought that was explicitly called out as a problem in the white paper.
Yeah, I'm fully in agreement with a limit on all accounts. Like you said, whales are already pretty limited in what they post anyway and it takes away anyone's ability to complain about SP based limits. When you browse around it seems like there are a lot of posts with little comment. More people need to be involved with commenting and curating.
Since there are not transactions fees in Steemit, there needs to be a way to regulate how much of the network people use. If there were no limits people with bots would flood the network and no one would be able to use. SP is a good metric because it equates to how much value the has in the system. They more value they have in the system the less likely they are to abuse it.
Why? Is it that we are worried about bots or spam? But isn't that the whole purpose behind the curation rewards? How could someone abuse being able to post and it not be curated or filtered out?
I think putting up a barrier to entry might not be a good idea especially if it's system wide. I think if it were just foe Steemit then fine but you're talking about putting it into Steem itself system wide? I don't think that is a good idea.
Suppose someone wants to build a chat app on top of Steem? Do we really want to meter out the posting for that? Especially when we know Graphene can scale to handle it?
Another thought is even if little posters are posting a lot, this is exactly a good thing because it keeps them engaged. It's probably why transaction volumes are so high and the whole site is so sticky. Facebook for example doesn't limit how many posts you can make on your timeline or anyone can comment so why should Steemit limit how many posts? It would make people post until the limit and then give up, and go back to Facebook, Twitter or Reddit where these limits don't exist?
If little posters are posting a lot then improve the interface so we don't all have to see it. I think most of these problems are due to there being no groups, no "subreddit" type category, no real way to deal with the flood of posts in any meaningful way, no dashboard, etc. I think let little posters post as much as they desire but simply let clients determine how much to see.
The only reason I would change my mind on this would be if somehow an attack vector could open up with consequences to Steem itself. I highly doubt it would be an effective attack vector but in any case for certain kinds of communication outside of Steemit you cannot have a rate limit of that sort.
This needs to be discussed more.
Wow I went to your site and saw the plagiarism article you had to post! Upvoted it also, but I'm very sorry for you, and now I think that topic needs to be part of this discussion as well. Either building some way to internally yet organically "certify" and protect copyright holders into the platform, and/or banning/destroying those who steal from other users. A few checks, balances, and proofs would have to be required tho - like 1st offense warning, 2nd offense severe penalty, 3rd strike you're out IF judged by several "witnesses" .. without them people could just "claim" someone did something wrong, start a downvote war, and destroy their legitimate competition (?) just because they're not "in the club" already. Very tough topic. Best on your work tho!
Good proposal,
how about a
Best regards,
holzmichl
I think these ideas are "crazy bad". No other social network has these kinds of limits so if you're trying to get people onto Steemit and to stay on Steemit then how do you benefit Steemit by having barriers to entry? 4 blog post per day is just too low.
Suppose Alice is doing a lifestream and wants to send a small video clip of every hour of her life? When you limit her to 4 posts per day then you force her to make much longer posts to compensate for this artificial scarcity. It doesn't actually help because now instead of us having a clean sequence per hour for 24/hrs we get a couple of 6 hour posts?
This will make people make longer posts which are less likely to be noticed, read, etc. If the point is to grow Steem then we want as many posts as possible. A post which our little group doesn't seem to think is valuable today could become valuable in a year or two because we don't have the time to evaluate every little post but this does not mean we shouldn't accept them.
Attention is always going to be scarce. If attention is always scarce then you don't really gain very much by trying to shrink the amount of posts down to the amount of attention. In my opinion because the amount of attention will grow over time we should accept as many posts as possible unless it starts to slow down the system which I highly doubt will ever happen due to the design of Graphene.
To put this into context, does Reddit have a cap? If Reddit has a cap then that same cap would work for Steemit, but I do not think Steem (underlying Steemit) should have any cap. Meaning you can say a person can post as much as they want but Steemit will only display up to a maximum. But I don't think we should put the maximum at the protocol or underlying Steem level or we will end up having similar debates as the max block size debate in the future and for what gain do we get from it?
Content quality is important but so is content diversity. You lose diversity by a 4 blog post per day limit, 16 reply post per day is insanely limiting. You can reply unlimited on Bitcointalk if you want to take the time to make unlimited replies but the limit is the amount of time you have in a day. Content quality in my opinion isn't the problem but discovery of quality content is the problem and we can solve that with a better UI.
Sounds good but I think 16 replies is a little low.
I agree I think 16 would be too low.. it is nice to be able to browse and post on things you have an interest in
Yes I think that the posting limits should be based on your SP. The larger the account, the larger the number of post allowed. I think that 4-5 a day would dramatically increase the quality, while simultaneously decreasing spam on the network. Great post though to start the conversation in the community!