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RE: What's Important to Steemit’s Longevity? - Inspiried by @anyx ‘Tragedy of The Commons’

in #steemit-future8 years ago (edited)

Even if 60000 people were voting equally do you think the trending page would stop having the same people on it? I sure don't. In every kind of content you have stars and bestsellers. In fact, 60000 might make it worse, because the swarm can't be reasoned with, and most will never take the time to find something unknown, they will just vote what is already popular. At least whales can be convinced to make a conscious effort to try to develop unknown talent (as some do regularly).

Also, nice post @hisnameisolllie

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that's a great prep talk to become a "star"! :D
But on a more serious note, I do not know...i'd like to believe that talent can share the trending page and also that new "stars" can be born. I also tend to think that people get bored eventually of the same names. And not everyone is a sheep and new blogs appear and get popular every day, even after 20years+ of internet and blogs. Is there really something new to say? And yet there is.
But I do agree, finding and nurturing talent is incredibly important and a noble duty here.

strongly disagree. I think a "one man one vote" system wouldnt work because of sybils and other security issues but generally, and also because it wouldnt reward investors. Howrver:

What makes content good? Well, joy is in the ears that hear, so they say. Content's appeal and utility to the community as a whole is what makes it good. SO when one says content will be better with whales picking it than with everyone having a voice what one is basically saying is I know better what everyone else wants to see than they do. Stated like this, of course, it seems absurd. But there can really be no other logical conclusion from the starting point that whales can pick better content than the group as a whole.

Read my comment again. I said nothing about making the content better (Do not appreciate the fictitious quotes either. Someone may read that and think I actually wrote those quoted statements, when I did not.)

Replying here due to nesting

I absolutely do believe that whales are far more likely to promote a largely variety of content from unknown sources than a swarm of users.

OK, i see what youre saying... that with the swarm voting it would be tougher for an unknown to break into the top of the trending page. I don't necessarily agree with that either, but i do see the distinction.

To me personally, the whole issue is wrapped in quality. I don't think most people's issue with the trending page is that its so hard to break into it. Its that very bad content frequently ends up on the trending page. While very good content ends up lost 84 pages from the top.

For example, I just saw that @dollarvigilante has the most followers on the platform at 2000.

I think TDV is a bad example for a bunch of reasons, but lets use him anyway. My guess is that TDV probably also has the most earnings of any author since they started offering a feed and made the "follow" button do something. Id further guess that if you went down the list of "most followers" you would find an ordered list of the highest earners since the follow button was enabled with some well known whales like berniesanders, you dan and ned who don't post much interspersed.

Of course, youll say that of course theyre the highest earners. They get all that money because they have so many followers. And ill say "No, they get all those followers because whales pin them to the top of the trending page 24/7" Its kind of a chicken and egg debate.

incidentally, i texted an old girlfriend who is a magazine editor with the use of quotation marks above, and asked her what she thought

"The punctuation is correct, but no editor in her right mind would let you use that. You're putting words in someone else's mouth"

so i guess my bad.

Someone may read that and think I actually wrote those quoted statements, when I did not.)

ive changed the quotes to italics, though i maintain that a quotation mark is the correct punctuation in such a circumstance.

I said nothing about making the content better.

Sorry, but you absolutely did. I'm not sure if your point is that "worse" isnt the opposite of "better" but yeah when you say (direct quote before you punctuation flame me again) "In fact, 60000 might make it worse" yes, that is exactly the same as saying the whales only having a say makes it better (or at least might make it better).

That is to say, that the statement A is worse than B is precisely the same as the statement B is better than A .

pretending otherwise just sounds like doubletalk.

@sigmajin by "worse" I was referring not to the content itself but to the objection (from comment above, and the earlier portion of my comment) of there being the same people constantly on the Trending page. Perhaps a better a better phrasing would be "might make matters worse" instead of "might make it worse", since "it" is somewhat ambiguous.

I absolutely do believe that whales are far more likely to promote a largely variety of content from unknown sources than a swarm of users. That is not a statement of value or taste. Indeed, perhaps the popular somewhat-uniform content is exactly what people want. For example, I just saw that @dollarvigilante has the most followers on the platform at 2000. That's not whales, and probably not a sybil attack either, since the followers leaderboard is not widely-followed (yet).

In the future when the structure of the system is different with better mechanisms for discovery and many independent channels for promotion, that might no longer be true.

@sigmajin

I think TDV is a bad example for a bunch of reasons, but lets use him anyway.

That's probably the crux of our disagreement. I think he's a great example because he one of the people who are always on treading, and if you look at the others they are much they same. Remove all the whale votes entirely and they would still be there. By contrast, the quirky stuff that I find and push to page 5 of trending and sometimes makes it from there to page 1 on its own would not be there.

Anyway, I'm going to bow out of this discussion in part as a boycott of fighting with the atrocious nesting limit. Nice chat.

currently all favors only few people to get post rewards:

  • Curation rewards encourage to vote for same persons
  • This leads to make to post trending, which leads to more votes / payouts
  • the exponential payout algorithm increases this problem exponential
  • minons don't have any significant voting power and most wont get one

What could we do to evolve?

  • Limit curation reward per user per time period lets say 30 days
  • display active posts as default and or choose the posts in an lottery like style - more voting power behind the post greater change to be chosen
  • Use linear post payouts - Self voting is not that big problem as expected, at worst its like paying to yourself and on top of that you have much too loose / get flaged or shadow voted
  • give out some universal income in Steem power to fully verified Minions. Verification could be done through for example two randomly chosen video chat verifications.

Thats all, happy steeming.

Curation rewards encourage to vote for same persons

Not really. Curation rewards favor voting on the same things that other people are going to vote on. Later voters do not get significant curation rewards by piling on, though some do continue to do so anyway in the mistaken believe that they will.

If I vote on @dollarvigilante again after voting for him the first time and it turns out he doesn't get votes any more because others have lost interest, then my vote does not do well. Simply voting for the same people again and again does not generate good curation rewards unless those people remain popular and continue to get votes from others.

If later voters are voting for stuff they don't like, they are the ones screwing it up and responsible for not getting the content they want, not the whales or bots who vote early. The latter are responding to the incentives set by the former.

In short, unless you are a power curator (whale/bot), just vote for what you like. The power curators and profit motive will respond by giving you what you want.

This system is very similar to the record industry. What is consistently promoted, and marketed, will do well. There are a lot of users that can produce content that is comparable to what makes it to the trending page, but they aren't on the approved list of who should be upvoted automatically. Some articles, not all, are on the trending page for reasons beyond the quality of the article itself.

True, a swarm, that is ignorant of how the system rewards them, will vote for the popular stuff, but they are doing it because they think that is what will make them easy money, when in most cases it doesn't. Educate them they are doing it wrong or nothing will change. For the user that is getting a 5k payout, he doesn't care at all that a user pumping up his post is doing so against his own best interest. They are incentivized to keep the real way things work a secret or at least confusing.

I'm sure most people didn't listen to the full debate between dollarvigilante and the "hater", so why did so many vote on it? It's not because they upvoted it organically. They are misguided in thinking it will line their pockets.

As mentioned elsewhere in these comments, and I'm sure you agree, we need to get to a point where people are voting for what they actually like or what is actually worth being given a reward rather than some game to make a few bucks. Right now Steemit feels too often like a game to make money and less like a place to spend your time enjoying yourself reading something interesting.

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