How Shall We Organise the Voting for "Bitfilm of the Day"?
Steemians, we need your input: tomorrow we want to start our daily film competition on Steemit and we have some ideas how to organise the voting. But we would be very interested in your feedback. Are we on the right track or do we need to change anything?
We want a voting that gives equal chances for all competing films. At the same time we need to minimise the chances of manipulation. While Steemit's voting mechanism is great for promoting its platform and currency, the fact that voting power is very unequally distributed would spoil the fun of a film competition.
Imagine if thousands of minnows voted for a film, but one whale voted for another one that nobody likes. In the normal Steemit process, the film with one whale vote would win the prize and the popular one with thousands of votes would lose. I believe this would be quite frustrating for the participating film makers and voters and discourage both from participating.
So think in this case a "one man, one vote" principle would fit better. Whale votes are of course important in order to make the contest lucrative for participating film makers. In the best case, whales would show their appreciation for our film competition by equally voting for all films of a week, then let the regular Steemians decide who should win the prize money.
Our solution is to simply add up all potential payouts of a week and pay them as prize money to the winning film maker. Who wins would simply be defined by the number of votes during the first 24 hours of a film's launch in the competition. Otherwise, the Monday film would have an advantage over the Friday film.
We are not entirely happy with this solution, as we would need to check and document the number of votes at a specific time every day. It requires human work and could lead to errors. We plan to check the number of votes at 7pm CET every day, at the same time we publish the next film. But it could happen that two films are very close in votes, so the exact time of the observation would make a difference. Is there a way to automate this process and make it less prone to human errors?
Another concern: with a "one man, one vote" principle, users could create several accounts to manipulate the voting. As Steemit makes it difficult to create new accounts (you need to log-in via Facebook or Reddit), this seems to be a neglectable risk. Would a film maker really create hundreds of fake Facebook accounts just to manipulate a film competition voting? Or did we forget anything here?
Please have a critical look at the terms of our film competition and let us know (in the comments) what we might need to improve.
How about a coefficient that takes reputation into account, such as
Rep < 30 = 0 and
Rep >= 30 = rep/100
The reputation of 30 is arbitrary of course. It's not perfect, but at least makes it more difficult for (unestablished) bots to sway the vote.
That's a good idea! Do you know someone who could write a script for that? We would not want to do that manually.
What about simply restricting the vote to Steemians with >= 30 reputation? Above that threshold all votes are equal, but the danger of someone creating many new fake accounts would be eliminated.
I see there always being some issue to deal with bots/sybil. My reasoning behind the >30 rep was to still give a little more weight to more established/higher rep accounts since those are harder for bots to reach. But I absolutely understand the want to minimize necessary calculating, especially with the frequency you'd be doing this.
I don't know off hand someone to write the script, but you may drop a message into general or dev steemit.chat rooms, or make a post into #dev category offering a few SD for someone to write.
Yeah. A voting process seems most reasonable. I have little knowledge about the ability of what bots can do though. Can't really apply my opinion about that there @sykochica